Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
a stretch of open ocean from Timor to Australia. They arrived in Australia
50,000 years ago, long before dogs were domesticated.
There were no wolves in Australia for these fi rst migrants to tame. The
native wild dog, the dingo, originated in Southeast Asia and came to Australia
only 5,000 years ago. The ancestors of the dingoes may have made the jour-
ney without human aid, but it is more likely that they were domestic dogs
that escaped from the boats of brief visitors to the continent.
Up to that time the Aborigines had never had the companionship
and help of dogs. When the dingoes did arrive they were not immediately
adopted. Some Aboriginal tribes simply followed the tracks of wild dingoes
to help them fi nd game. Others captured pups occasionally and raised them
as hunters, but then allowed most of them to escape. Still others raised din-
goes for food. A few tribes raised the dogs but used them chiefl y to keep
warm during cold nights, much as the Incas on the other side of the Pacifi c
wide spectrum of interactions had characterized the original domestication
of wolves millennia earlier in East Asia.
Australians survived without dogs for tens of thousands of years, but our
ancestors in Africa had to survive without them for millions. The bones of a
domesticated dog from the Nile Delta, the oldest yet found on that continent,
date from only about 4,700 years ago. As dogs spread south from Egypt they
were rapidly adopted by dif erent tribes, resulting in unique breeds like the
Khoi dog of the San peoples and the strangely barkless Basenji.
A recent study by Carlos Bustamante at Cornell and his colleagues
fi nds that African village dogs have as high a level of genetic variation as
East Asian dogs, calling into question Savolainen's argument that the vari-
order for there to have been a separate African domestication of dogs, East
Asian wolves would somehow have had to make it to Africa, or to have been
brought there. Argument continues, but I suspect that the Asian origin of
domestic dogs will continue to hold up.
It may be lucky for African ecosystems that dogs arrived there so recently.
If hunting tribes had been aided by dogs, they might have done irreparable
damage to their environment.
