As recently as 110 years ago, Aboriginal Australian hunters enlisted help from an unlikely source. They used dingoes, difficult-to-train canines halfway between wolves and dogs, to help trap and kill kangaroos and emus. This might provide us with new insights into how and why humans domesticated dogs thousands of years ago.
Dingoes are found across most of Australia today. Exactly when they arrived is unclear: the earliest dingo fossils are about 3300 years old, but DNA evidence suggests that they had arrived from Asia thousands of years earlier.
Their pedigree is controversial: some researchers believe dingoes had fully domesticated ancestors and then turned feral. However, it is possible that dingoes descended from canids that hung about near human settlements in Asia without ever being fully domesticated, says Pat Shipman at Penn State University in Pennsylvania.
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We know from historical accounts that people sometimes collected dingo puppies from the wild to keep as pets. However, some of those same historical records suggest that the animals were too disobedient to serve much practical purpose on big game hunts.
“Bringing dingoes on hunts where the main technique is stalking or sneaking up on a kangaroo didn’t work well,” says Loukas Koungoulos at the University of Sydney. “Their eagerness to pursue usually caused the prey to become aware of the danger and flee early.”
But Koungoulos and Melanie Fillios at the University of New England in Australia have now found evidence that indigenous hunters took advantage of this, using dingoes to help flush out large kangaroos and emus towards concealed groups of hunters armed with weapons.
The evidence comes from 19th and early 20th-century historical accounts, and Koungoulos says that recent large-scale digitisation efforts now make it easier to search through this literature for information on historical hunting techniques.
Naturalist Thomas Ward described the practice in the 1900s in northern Australia. “Kangaroo and wallaby are … driven into a crowd with the aid of the semi-tame dingo dogs,” he wrote, adding that a few emu were caught this way too.
We can’t be sure which indigenous group Ward was referring to, but Koungoulos says a similar account in the 1840s by an explorer called John Ainsworth suggests that the Bundjalung people of eastern Australia used dingoes on kangaroo hunts. And in 1831, Isaac Scott Nind described similar hunts that were conducted by the Mineng Noongar people of south-western Australia.
“It turns out that the dingoes’ tendency to make prey animals flee before them was actually useful in settings where their direction of movement could be managed,” says Koungoulos. “The dingoes don’t appear to have been particularly trained for this task.”
This is a crucial point in understanding how dogs may have come to be domesticated, says Shipman. We might think of domestication as selective breeding to tame and control a species, but long before canids were bred for obedience, they might have begun cooperating with humans on hunts.
They would effectively have lent their speed and sharp sense of smell to human hunters, who then dispatched large and potentially dangerous prey. “If the [wolf-dog] could do the chasing part and leave the killing to humans who then share the food, that’s not a bad deal,” she says.
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
