Savolainen's team further concluded that the dingo was brought to Australia as a domestic animal, as part of the expansion of Austronesian culture from south China into Island Southeast Asia. This expansion is thought, began about 6,000 years ago. This culture is known to have utilised a number of domestic animals, including dogs.
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This conclusion is partly based on DNA analysis results and is partly speculative, as an attempt to explain how the dingo travelled across at least 50 kilometres of open sea to reach the Australian continent. (This was the narrowest estimated sea journey required when the sea level was at its lowest during the last glacial maximum; at any time since then the journey would have been longer).
The DNA evidence shows that the dingo has a particular DNA type that is only found today among domestic dogs in East Asia , Island Southeast Asia and in American dogs. The fact that the predominant dingo DNA type is also found in East Asian dogs favoured the authors' conclusion that the dingo is descended from ancient Asian domesticated dogs.
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| Another possibility, however, is that Asian dogs with this DNA type, along with dingoes, are descended from an extinct type of Asian wolf, of which the dingo was an undomesticated direct descendent at the time of arrival to Australia .
In any case, domestication is not an all or nothing state of being. It can occur in degrees. It is unfortunate that the mass media in Australia , in reporting the Savolainen's research, simplified the message, creating the impression that, on arrival, the dingo was a domestic dog as we know it today.
Another reason for the research team concluding that dingoes must have been domesticated when brought to Australia in the ancient past was that they could not imagine how this could easily have been done with a wolf. The question that the researchers seem to have asked themselves is why would anyone put a wolf on a boat for a long sea journey? A simple answer would be – for food. Juvenile wolves or wolf pups may have been quite manageable on a sea journey. A more measured claim as to the degree of domestication of dingoes, at the time of their arrival is articulated by geneticist Alan Wilton, a member of Savolainen's research team, when he says:
Many changes have occurred through strong selection pressure to create modern domestic dogs, which are not present in the dingo. This makes the dingo extremely interesting to scientists, as it is in a spot half way down the domestication path, and comparison of it [with] wolves and dogs can tell us about the genetic changes during domestication. (Alan Wilton, Private Communication, 2004)
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In any case, whatever degree of domestication the dingo may have had on arrival, perhaps 5,000 odd years ago, it has been subject to thousand of years of selection pressure in the wild since then. This selection pressure has almost certainly pushed the dingo back towards wolf behaviour. This sort of selection process is pointed to by Savolainen's team when they write:
…the present semidomestic state of the dingo can probably be attributed to a long existence as a feral animal. (Savolainen et al. 2004: 12390)
Savolainen, P., Leitner, T., Wilton , A. Matiso-Smith, E. and Lundeberg, J. ‘A detailed picture of the origin of the Australian dingo, obtained from the study of mitochondrial DNA’, in PNAS , vol. 101, no. 33, Aug.17, 2004 |
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