Ancient fossil discovery rewrites origin of Australia's dingoes

A belief that Australia’s dingoes are descendants of pariah dogs of Thailand or India is under a cloud, after compelling new research pinpointed a new evolutionary path. In a world-first, scientists have linked dingo fossils to animals from East Asia and New Guinea.

Previous studies used what’s called morphometric analysis, a measure of size and shape to determine its ancestry. But as science has become more sophisticated, scientists at Sydney University were able to utilise laser scanners and geometric morphometrics on 3000-year-old fossilised dingo remains and create highly detailed 3D images.

Archeologist Dr Loukas Koungoulos said the application of the technology to fossils helped them discover a clearer picture of how ancient dingoes appeared. "It's exciting times," he said.

This enabled them to more accurately compare them to other types of dogs in the Asia Pacific region. “Our question was where did they come from and could there be a clue in how they looked. But we also wondered if they were the same as today’s dingoes,” he said.

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Dingo origins hotly debated by scientists

The dingo's origin story has been a hotly debated topic between scientists for over a century, and the species is known to have come to the country more than 3,000 years ago. In Indigenous communities the animal features in important cultural stories, and it’s considered to be a native animal that plays a vital role in natural ecosystems.

After analysing the fossilised remains the scientists discovered the dingoes' ancestors were much smaller than today’s dogs. They looked most similar to modern day landrace Japanese dogs — which have more variation than traditional breeds — as well as the ‘singing dogs’ of New Guinea.

How did ancient dingoes look?

The fossils they used were sourced from Lake Mungo and Lake Milkengay in NSW and they are believed to be the second and fourth oldest directly carbon dated dingoes.

“Even within the 150 years between them we can see a bit of change. The younger one is quite a bit larger than the super old one,” Koungoulos said.

“My theory is that when dingo ancestors arrived here… they were presented with a whole suite of native fauna to predate upon. There’s not a whole lot for dogs to live off in South East Asia, but there’s a whole diverse range here of lizards, marsupials and rodents. I think they basically had an opportunity to evolve a larger body size in order to tackle things like wallabies and kangaroos.”

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The study team included Associate Professor Melanie Fillios from the University of New England and Dr Ardern Hulme-Beaman from the University of Liverpool and the research was published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

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