An early arrival

The Dingo (Canis lupus dingo) is a medium-sized, erect-eared, generally sandy-coloured dog which, unlike domestic dogs, breeds only once a year, usually in winter.  Like all dogs it is a carnivore and its prey is mostly of medium-sized and small mammals, in Victoria the Black Wallaby often features in its diet.  Dingos are less widespread than they were at the time of European settlement due to energetic extermination programs, principally in the farmland areas of the state.  Most Dingo populations are now in eastern Victoria in heavily forested country.

The most common colour form of the Dingo is sandy with touches of white - as in the photograph below - but these make up about 50% of the population while the rest are combinations of pure black, black and white, brindled, black and tan and occasionally white.  Since European settlement feral domestic dogs have begun breeding with wild dingoes and the proportion of hybrids may now be as high as 80% of the total population.  There is some evidence, from DNA research, that the crossing is only between Dingo bitches and domestic dogs, while Dingo males only breed with Dingo females.

It is common knowledge that Dingoes are not native to Australia, at least in the sense that they didn't evolve here - there are no native placental carnivores in this country.  However, they were in Australia before the first Europeans arrived and as they were often seen in the company of Aboriginal families it was once believed that they arrived here with the first humans, as relatively domesticated animals.  Current evidence now suggests that the story isn't as simple as this, in fact very little of the Dingo story is simple or straightforward.

It is probable that humans have been in Australia for at least 40,000 years but the earliest known sub-fossil deposits of the Dingo dates back about 3,500 years.  Dingoes have never been in Tasmania so it has been assumed that they were not in Victoria at the time when Tasmania was last linked to the mainland - about 10,000 years ago.  That leaves a gap of at least 30,000 years between the first human habitation and the arrival of the Dingo. So how did the Dingo get to Australia? 

It has been postulated that seafarers, possibly traders from south-east Asia, came to this country about 4000-5000 years ago, and brought Dingoes with them as a food supply or as pets.  It is also suggested, on the basis of molecular studies, that this may have happened only once and that all Australian Dingoes are the progeny of a handful of animals - perhaps just one bitch and a few dogs.  While this theory would account for the difference in the timetable between the arrival of Dingoes and humans, it still doesn't answer the important question of what a Dingo is. 

Just about all the theories about Dingo origin suggest that it came from somewhere in south-east Asia and it is a relative of an Asian wolf of some sort.  One of the popular theories is that the ancestor is the Indian Wolf - Canis lupus pallipes - but proponents of this theory have always been vague about what point this diversion took place and where the other south-east Asian Dingoes could be found.  The unravelling of what Dingoes are is made even more complicated by the dreadful job taxonomists have done with the scientific naming of the Dingo and indeed of dogs in general. 

The first person to apply a scientific name to the Dingo was the Scottish writer and illustrator, Robert Kerr who, in 1792, prepared an English translation of the mammalian volume of Carl Linnaeus' Systema Naturae - the basis for all modern animal and plant nomenclature.  Kerr not only translated Linnaeus work but he added new names and descriptions where he thought they were warranted.  In this endeavour he followed Linnaeus' lead in attributing species rank to the known breeds of dog.  Thus, where Linnaeus named the English Bulldog Canis molossus, and the Greyhound, Canis cursorius, Kerr added the recently discovered Dingo and named it, Canis antarcticus (New Holland Dog, or Southern Dog). 

This name was used for a long time in mammalian literature, it was the name applied in Troughton's Furred Animals of Australia (1941) and it continued to appear in a number of publications in scientific journals into the 1960s.  This caused some confusion in the scientific community as Charles Darwin, in 1833, had applied the same name to the, now extinct, Falkland Island Fox.  By the late 1960s the generally accepted name for the Dingo became Canis dingo, based on another description by Meyer in 1793, but its use too was short-lived.  By the 1970s it became clear that many so-called species of Canis were in fact simply different forms or breeds of the Grey Wolf, Canis lupus, so the classification framework for the genus changed.  Curiously, taxonomists decided to divide the Grey Wolf into two distinct groups, one which included naturally-occurring and wild forms, and the other which included the domesticated forms.  So the Grey Wolf became two species, the wild Canis lupus, and its many subspecies, and the domestic Canis familiaris, with all its breeds.  As Dingoes were thought to have been domesticated before they arrived in Australia they were included in the latter group and took the name Canis familiaris dingo, while everything from the Irish Wolfhound to the Mexican Hairless Dog was incorporated under Canis familiaris familiaris.

Neither the classification as Canis dingo nor Canis familiaris dingo helps with understanding where the Dingo fits into the world of wolves and dogs.  Both names suggest that the Dingo is part of a separate species from any wild wolf which might claim to be its progenitor, and as no scientist would accept that speciation could occur in a few thousand years, it is difficult to reconcile the distinctions made by this classification. 

Twenty or so years later another change took place in the classification of the Grey Wolf.  All members of the group (nearly 40) were regarded as subspecies of Canis lupus and the Dingo became Canis lupus dingo which put it at the same evolutionary level as the Indian Wolf, Canis lupus pallipes, the Timber Wolf, Canis lupus lycaon and the Egyptian Wolf, Canis lupus lupastor.  The domestic breeds were still lumped under one rather unsatisfactory group, Canis lupus familiaris, but the Dingo was no longer part of it.  Now the question of the Dingo's origin can be asked again, but assigning it to the Indian Wolf seems to be less likely as both are considered to be subspecies in their own right.  The answer to the Dingo origin now seems to be that it is, and always has been, itself. 

When the first Dingo arrived in Australia, as a semi-domesticated subspecies of the Grey Wolf, it came from somewhere in south-east Asia where there are other semi-domesticated wolves.  One place they are found today is Papua New Guinea, where they are called Singing Dogs because, like the Dingo, they seldom bark and communicate by howls.  Some biologists have declared the New Guinea Singing Dog to be a separate species, Canis hallstromi, others call it a subspecies, Canis lupus hallstromi, but most call it what it probably is, a Dingo, and most believe it found its way to the island in a similar manner to its arrival in Australia.  Dingoes have now been found all over south-east Asia, in Burma, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and China, often living with or near human populations in forests or woodlands.  It is believed that they were once much more widespread than this and their numbers have declined in proportion to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the people they interacted with.

In a move that would surprise, perhaps dismay, many Australian farmers, in 2008 the Dingo was categorised as vulnerable in the IUCN Red List and listed as threatened under the Victorian Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act.  The basis for this classification is that the subspecies numbers have drastically declined across its range in Europe and Asia, that there are no conservation programs in place in most of its current locations, that Australia has the largest population of the subspecies anywhere in the world, and that its long-term survival is threatened by hybridising with truly domesticated animals that have been introduced since European settlement.  

But the discussion is not over.  In 2017 a group of zoologists from Australia and elsewhere determined, from genomic studies, that dingoes were genetically part of an ancestral group of wolves that became what we now call domestic dogs.  Hence dingoes are really feral, rather than naturally wild animals and should be regarded as simply a breed of Canis familiaris.  As a result the IUCN removed the Dingo from its Red List and the Australian Faunal Directory, the peak advisory body for animal taxonomy, considers the matter to be unresolved.  Meanwhile there are many other scientists who make strong cases for maintaining the Dingo as distinct from domestic dogs and wild, northern hemisphere wolves.  Science hasn't really helped the Dingo's identity crisis.

The Dingo has come a long way, both literally and figuratively, in Australia.  It came here as a stranger and quickly became a hunting partner and companion for the early human hunter-gatherers.  After European settlement both the original human inhabitants and the Dingo were disenfranchised and persecuted because they competed with the new settlers for land and livestock.  And now the Australian populations, which are under threat, have become the last bastions for a species that formed part of one of the most successful and long-term human-animal cooperatives.

© Paul Gullan, Viridans Biological Databases