Are Australians Accidentally Redomesticating the Dingo? | Hacker News Reader

Are Australians Accidentally Redomesticating the Dingo?

theatlantic.com

44 pointscurtis14 comments

I wonder whether something like this will happen to urban foxes - the ones in London are extraordinarily bold, sometimes happily trotting past humans a foot or two away.

I particularly wonder this because of Belyayev's famous experiments [1], in which selecting silver foxes for reduced flight distance (i.e. "tameness") led to them developing visibly doglike characteristics. I haven't noticed any sign of this in urban foxes yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_fox_(animal)#Initial_ex...

Maybe the speed at which it happens is a factor? I'd imagine that breeding them directly for tameness and nothing else would push them in a different direction than allowing them to self-select for fitness in a highly populated urban environment.

Interestingly, a similar thing has happened in the United States with the Carolina Dog. They are supposedly also referred to as the "American Dingo", though I've never heard anyone actually ever call them that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_Dog

It's basically an ancient breed of wild/pariah dog ranged in the Southeastern United States that has undergone re-domestication in recent history. Not sure how much they actually have in common with Australian dingoes, but they are a terribly lovable breed.

I call them American Dingos.

Having grown up with one, I can confirm that they are amazing.

There is something special about seeing a sleeping dog listen at you.

Morphological changes seem to happen very early in domestication. Anyone interested in this should read about Belyaev's fox domestication experiments... super fascinating!

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160912-a-soviet-scientist-c...

No. Recent evidence shows dingoes came with an Indian immigration wave quite early on. In short, they were introduced to Australia pre-domesticated, by another population, when Australia was already populated by the aborigines. Then they were kept domesticated by aborigines, and now plenty of people still keep them as pets. Re-domestication? More like fourth-wave popularity.

Why would Indians bring them to Australia if they weren't already domesticated? It's a long trip for a wild animal to be kept on a boat.

I think you mis-read 'pre-domesticated' (already domesticated) as 'pre-domestication' (not yet domesticated).

This is a guess, food? Sailors take live animals for food reserves. Perhaps dogs are easier to maintain than pigs/chickens etc on sailing voyages?

Do you have references for the multiple migrations, especially from India? I know there was this paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/5/1803, but I had the impression that hadn't been replicated.

That's the paper, it has its own references.

We also detect a signal indicative of substantial gene flow between the Indian populations and Australia well before European contact, contrary to the prevailing view that there was no contact between Australia and the rest of the world. We estimate this gene flow to have occurred during the Holocene, 4,230 y ago. This is also approximately when changes in tool technology, food processing, and the dingo appear in the Australian archaeological record, suggesting that these may be related to the migration from India.

...

There is a sudden change in stone tool technologies, with microliths appearing for the first time (43), and people start processing plants differently (14, 44). It has been a matter of controversy as to whether these changes occurred in situ (45) or reflect contact with people from outside Australia or some combination of both factors. However, the dingo also first appears in the fossil record at this time and must have come from outside Australia (46). Although dingo mtDNA appears to have a SE Asian origin (47), morphologically, the dingo most closely resembles Indian dogs (46). The fact that we detect a substantial inflow of genes from India into Australia at about this same time does suggest that all of these changes in Australia may be related to this migration.

In summary we now have at least four roughly supportive lines of evidence: the stone archaeological record, the dingo bone archaeological record, the genetic record, and comparative morphological characteristics. There is no technical reason why ocean travel could not have been made between Australia and islands to the north, indeed it would be stranger for it not to have happened since those islands almost all had native oceangoing traditions and birds would have been visible migrating to and from Australia so the fact there was land there would have been blindingly obvious.

So, "redomesticated" is not wrong; it's merely potentially misleading.

Also, pure bred dingos are starting to diminish in number, as they are interbreeding with feral dogs. So their temperament changes, too.

This could be tested; there is a pure bred population on Fraser island, that has plenty of exposure to humans, namely eating their garbage and unsecured food.

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