Dingoes native to Indonesia

2003-09-30 09:29

Sydney - New DNA research has found that Australia's iconic wild dog, the dingo, probably descended from a family pet brought to the continent 5 000 years ago.

The research unveiled at a New South Wales University conference and reported in Tuesday's press, said the mother of all dingoes may have been a single pregnant female travelling with a group of migrants from what is now Indonesia.

"All the dingoes have a very similar DNA type," said Alan Wilton, a molecular biologist and geneticist at the university.

"Any variations we find in a population is only a single mutation away from the main type," he said.

"Based on this ... we put the time of arrival of the dingo at about 5 000 years ago," he said. The oldest dingo remains found in Australia date back 3 500 years.

Dingoes are believed to have been brought by migrants as hunting dogs and "living blankets" for their body warmth at night. Once in Australia, they reproduced and went feral, becoming the wild dog known as a dingo, Wilton said.

The DNA findings suggest all dingoes descended from a very small number of dogs or even just one female.

"The data would fit a single female ... that was pregnant," he said.

Researchers believe the prototype dingo was a breed of dog domesticated in Southeast Asia 10 000-15 000 years ago.

But due to inter-breeding with other feral dogs, the pure dingo is rapidly disappearing now in Australia, where 80% of the animals now are estimated to be hybrids.

- AFP