Ars Technica: Australian Aboriginals cared for a dingo's grave for decades

Posted in pets, because those of us who lived with a dog will understand

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Archaeologists recently studied the burial in what’s now New South Wales, Australia. They found that the Barkindji ancestors had buried the dingo with the same care and ceremony as any beloved human member of the community and looked after the grave for centuries. The burial reveals that dingoes were, as Australian Museum and University of Sydney archaeologist and study co-author Amy Way puts it, “deeply valued and loved” by ancient people in Australia.
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The dingo’s bones tell their own story. Koungoulos says he was probably between 4 and 7 years old, which would be late middle age for a wild dingo today. Heavily worn teeth were the first hint of the dingo’s senior citizen status, but the ends of his leg bones also showed signs of bone decay, probably thanks to long-term inflammation: possibly something like arthritis.

And he was shorter than most wild dingoes, based on the length of his femurs. That’s not unusual—domesticated animals are often shorter than their wild relatives, and it doesn’t take many generations for that to show up—but it could say something interesting about exactly how close wild dingoes got to domestication in the centuries before European colonists wrecked everything.

At some point, the dingo had suffered a broken rib and lower leg. Koungoulos suggests the injuries look like the aftermath of a kangaroo kick and may have happened on a hunt. The injuries themselves aren’t too surprising; wild dingoes hunt kangaroos, and Aboriginal hunters worked with dingoes the same way people in other parts of the world have hunted with dogs for millennia. What’s more striking is that the two injuries were long-since healed. Somebody nursed this dingo back to health after his kangaroo encounter.