The Coming of the Dingo

Abstract

The dingo, or native dog, arrived in Australia with people traveling on watercraft in the Late Holocene. By the time Europeans colonized the continent, dingoes were incorporated into the lives of Indigenous Australians, integrated into their kin systems and songlines, and used for a variety of purposes, including as companion animals, as guards, and as a biotechnology for hunting. Women, in particular, formed close bonds with dingoes, and they were widely used in women’s hunting. The incorporation of dingoes into Indigenous societies would therefore have had a significant impact on people’s lives. The greater contribution of meat to the diet would have allowed increased sedentism, improved fecundity, and therefore population growth. Such changes are hinted at in the archaeological record and indicate that more analysis of subsistence evidence could identify when and how the dingo–human relationship formed and how it varied in different environments across Australia.

Dingoes, companions in life and death: The significance of archaeological canid burial practices in Australia

“…BP (3031 ± 34 OxA-27532) for a specimen from surface deposits in Koonalda Cave [6] provide a minimum entry time for dingoes to the Australian continent of approximately 3300 years before present. A late Holocene arrival timeframe best fits the evidence from New Guinea and other islands to Australia's north where dog bones are not found in contexts older than 3,300 years BP [7]. However, more direct dates are needed, especially from northern Australia where few dates have been obtained, to refine the timing of arrival and the rate of dispersal across the continent.…”

“…In daily life dingoes were used for a variety of purposes including as personal protection, warmth, companionship, as guards, and as a "living technology" for hunting [18][19][20][21][22]. These uses, including the degree to which dingoes were used as hunting aids, varied geographically [7]. A variety of written, oral and visual sources suggest that dingoes were incorporated into Indigenous people's kin systems and cosmologies, holding important positions in stories and being the subject of songlines and ceremonies across vast areas of Australia [23][24][25][26][27].…”

Re‐assessing regional chronologies for island southeast Asian voyaging to Aboriginal Australia

“…Even before recent chronological refinements of northwest Arnhem Land sequences using large populations of AMS dates, there was some evidence for early encounters (Bowdler, 2002;Clarke, 2000a: 327). As Bowdler (2002: 184) has argued, it would perhaps be equally appropriate to date the commencement of this era to c.3300 calBP (Balme & O'Connor, 2021), at which time the dingo arrived in northern Australia by sea.…”

“…Even before recent chronological refinements of northwest Arnhem Land sequences using large populations of AMS dates, there was some evidence for early encounters (Bowdler, 2002; Clarke, 2000a: 327). As Bowdler (2002: 184) has argued, it would perhaps be equally appropriate to date the commencement of this era to c.3300 calBP (Balme & O'Connor, 2021), at which time the dingo arrived in northern Australia by sea. Until further work can be conducted on the trepang processing sites at Entrance Island and Lyäba, including anthracological research to control for the “old wood” problem, these dates must be left aside.…”

“…The find is currently a chronological outlier, but it may be evidence for an early encounter with Asian ceramicists. Indeed, the introduction of the dingo to northern Australia c.3300 calBP indicates that Aboriginal people were then connected to island Melanesia and/or southeast Asia (Balme & O'Connor, 2021; Manne et al., 2019).…”