When they see the picture of the Dingo, many readers can't help but exclaim: Isn't this the neighbor Ah Huang? The Australian wild dog and the Chinese pastoral dog born and raised in china do look very similar, so many netizens say that the Chinese pastoral dog is the ancestor of the Australian wild dog, and some Chinese pastoral dogs have been brought to Australia to re-re-rewild, becoming today's Australian overlord - the Australian wild dog. How, do you feel confident when you hear this statement?
A dingo in Fraser Island
However, modern scientific research confirms that this claim is actually wrong. The following zoology combines the research on molecular genetics of domestic dogs done by the academic community in the past ten years to trace the roots of the Australian wild dog and clarify the true relationship between it and the Chinese pastoral dog.
Who are the ancestors of the Australian Wild Dog? First, genetic analysis tells us that it is closer to a domestic dog than to a wild wolf. In other words, wolves are first domesticated into dogs, and then some dogs return to the Australian wild to become Australian wild dogs.
Genetic testing found that dogs around the world have six mitochondrial branches (a to f) and 51 haplotypes. Mitochondria are maternally inherited, and the same mitochondrial haplotype is passed down from the same maternal ancestor. All Dingoes, as well as 20% of New Guinea singing dogs, belong to the mitochondrial A29 haplogroup, suggesting that they have the same "super grandmother".
New Guinea Singing Dogs
Outside of Oceania, this haplotype is found only in dog breeds east of the Himalayas, a29 percent of Chinese pastoral dogs, 1 percent of Southeast Asian native dogs, and 12 percent of Borneo, as well as in several northern dog breeds, such as Alaskan, Husky and Siberian Sleds.
Considering that all today's dogs are a group of wolves that were domesticated in southern China 16,000 years ago, the migration route of the dingo is roughly outlined: South China→ Southeast Asia→ the Malay Islands→ New Guinea→ Australia.
So, when and how did the Dingo arrive in Australia? In the past, the most popular view in academia was "Austronesians".
A Fraser Island dingo caught a fish
After entering the Neolithic Age, the Austronesians mastered advanced navigation techniques and occupied large and small islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, as far as New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island. Moreover, Austronesians have dogs.
The hypothesis is also consistent with archaeological evidence, with the earliest Australian wild dog remains found so far dating back about 3,300 years (from the Mandurah Caves from southeastern Western Australia), and the Austronesians captured the Polynesian Islands almost 3,000 years ago.
However, the Austronesians say also has fatal flaws. First, Australia is not the territory of the Austronesians. Austronesians must have been to Australia, but because of its indigenous population, they did not establish themselves here. Indigenous Australians are brown people who migrated from East Africa along the indian Ocean coast about 65,000 years ago, while Austronesians are East Asians. However, the fact that the Austronesians did not succeed in colonizing did not mean that the dogs they brought with them must not be able to do so.
The migration map of the Austronesians bypasses Australia alone
For the second flaw, scientists also sequenced mitochondrial DNA in Polynesian dogs and found that they belonged to the haplotypes of arc 1 and arc 2, not a dingo a29.
The third defect is the most fatal. Both nucleus and mitochondrial DNA show that the dingo has two major branches, the northwest australian and the southeast australian have been differentiated for 8300 years, while the southeast Australian and New Guinea singing dogs have been separated for only 7800 years.
This shows that the Australian wilderness was not born in mainland Australia, but in another part of Oceania (most likely New Guinea), and then the army entered Australia in two ways. And this point in time should have been 8,000 years ago, much earlier than the expansion of the Austronesians. This can be said to directly negate the "South Islanders say".
Scientists also analyzed the y chromosome inherited from the father line of the Dingo and found that there are two haplotypes of the y chromosome: h3 and h60. H3 occurs in both East Asia and northern Europe, and H60 originates from the mutation of H5 in East Asia. The wild dog and new Guinea singing dog in northeast Australia are both h60, and there is only h3 in western Australia, while there are both kinds of south but h3 is dominant.
A dingo in the Narrabor Plains
The y-chromosome results also support the conclusion that the ancestor of the Dingo came from East Asia, that it was a sister group with the New Guinea Singing Dog, and that it entered Australia in two groups.
After the domestication of dogs in South China, they spread very rapidly, using 2,000 years to cross the Eurasian continent (as evidenced by the remains of dogs in Europe 14,000 years ago), and they were also able to quickly reach the southernmost tip of Asia, where sea levels were very low during the ice age (12,000 years ago), and the Malay Peninsula and the Sunda Islands were linked.
However, the Sunda Islands and New Guinea have long been separated, and the strait in the middle is at least 50 kilometers wide. Wild dogs can't swim that far and must take a boat to get past it. Most likely, the ancestors of the Sunda Islands at that time may have crossed the ocean in a simple wooden boat to New Guinea, and the dog followed.
The land and sea pattern of Southeast Asia and Oceania when the Dingo crossed south
Oceania lacked large carnivores that could restrain wild dogs, and some of the islands of New Guinea, the Australian mainland, and the Torres Strait were still connected (about 8500 to 6500 years ago), so wild dogs soon spread in these places, although the inhabitants who brought them over did not have a foothold here.
Aboriginal Australians may have quickly embraced the wild dogs and helped them spread. Since then, the Dingo and New Guinean Singing Dogs have been isolated from dogs from the outside world until the arrival of European colonists.
The creation of the Dingo is ample proof that the expansion of dogs, although aided by humans, did not depend on humans. Because the Austronesians failed to gain a foothold in Australia, the fruits of Neolithic civilization such as agriculture, chickens and pigs did not benefit Australia, but dogs sneaked past them long before them and survived in a unique way to this day.
The Australian wild dog is said to be difficult to tame, but it is still kept by people
There is circumstantial evidence that Aoye originated before the Neolithic Age. Both wolves and dogs have an amy28 gene, which is associated with amylase synthesis. After the Neolithic period, the cultivation industry flourished, humans had food to eat, and the number of copies of the gene increased greatly in the dogs that enjoyed agricultural civilization with humans in East Asia and Europe, while the Australian wild dog, like the wolf and the husky, had only two copies of the gene, and the ability to digest starch was still very weak.
Australian wild dogs descended to the South China Sea, and some of their ancestors and descendants remained in South China and the Southeast Asian continent, and theoretically, these "left-behind dogs" are the closest relatives of the Australian wild dogs. In the 1990s, many canine experts held this view, treating the New Guinea singing dog and the Thai dog (Southeast Asian wild dog) as the same kind of Australian wild dog, and correspondingly, the Chinese native dog is their close relative.
The hound of the Iban people of Borneo
However, genetic analysis confirmed that this idea was completely wrong, because it underestimated the ability of dogs and their owners, humans, to migrate. In recent thousands of years, Southeast Asia has undergone many large-scale population migrations, at least three of which have had a profound impact on the genetic structure of the region's dog populations.
The first was the migration of Austronesians. The Austronesians brought the dogs of Southeast Asia to the Polynesian Islands and New Zealand, and these dogs were the cousins of the Polynesian dog, the Dingo. Because there were already aborigines and wild dogs on the Australian continent, the South Islanders and their dogs came late and failed to colonize
New Guinea is a common transit point for the migration of the Dingo and Polynesian earth dogs, so there are both mitochondrial haplotype a29 (20%) of the Australian wild dog and haplotype arc 1 (7%) of the Polynesian earth dog.
The migration routes of dogs in Southeast Asia and Oceania, as well as the proportion of mitochondrial haploids everywhere
The second was the migration of the Dongtai people. From the Yanhuang era to the Qin and Han Dynasties, in order to expand the new living space, the Dongtai people continued to move from the south of China to Southeast Asia, and the original local dogs were basically replaced by the dogs of the Dongtai people.
The y-chromosome haplotype h60 of the Australian wild dog is a mutant of East Asian h5, and they share a common paternal ancestor. However, H5 is now very rare in Southeast Asia, but it is common in Taiwan. This shows that the ancestors of the dingo have basically no living paternal descendants on the Southeast Asian continent, and only the islands such as Taiwan still have remnants.
Maternal haplotype a29 of the Australian wild dog still exists in both East and Southeast Asia, but analysis of longer mitochondrial DNA sequences shows that there is a difference between A29 in Asia and a29 in Oceania. This means that although they are all descendants of the A29 archaeopteryx (the A29 she-wolf in South China 16,000 years ago), they do not belong to the same branch. In this way, the latest maternal ancestor of the Dingo has been extinct in Asia.
The Royal Veterinary College Anatomy Museum displays the majeure skeleton
The third was the migration of Chinese. Chinese scholars have found that from 7000 to 2000 years ago, dogs in the Yellow River and Yangtze River basins in China basically belong to the mitochondrial a1b sub-branch (some articles write a2), and the Australian wild dog and the Polynesian earth dog are all sub-branch. However, today's Chinese Pastoral Dog rarely has a sub-branch of A1B.
After the Han Dynasty, a large number of dogs from the frontier areas poured in, and the original dogs in the Central Plains were largely replaced. Although the Australian wild dog comes from East Asia, it is a descendant of the southward migration of the original East Asian dog, and the Chinese pastoral dog is the descendant of the late one, and the two are not directly related.
According to genetic analysis, the Dingo, like the African Bashangi, belongs to the basic taxa of dogs. The so-called basic taxa is a branch that diverges in the early evolution of dogs, located near their common ancestor. This means that the Dingo represents a unique, isolated population of early undifferentiated dogs that are estranged from any current breed of domestic dog.
Chinese Pastoral Dog
In ancient times, there was a small-scale genetic exchange between dogs in the East and the West, but the Dingo has been in isolation for 8,000 years. Therefore, although the Chinese Pastoral Dog looks like the Australian Dingo, its relationship with the Australian Wild Dog is more distant than that of the Chihuahua, Bomei, VIP, corgi and other dog breeds with strange looks.
Some readers may not be convinced, since the Australian wild dog and the Chinese pastoral dog are not close relatives, why do they look so similar? This is because they have not been artificially selected, dogs will evolve into this way under natural selection, and wolves in southern Asia will look similar, this phenomenon is called parallel evolution.
Judging from the early remains of the dingo, its morphology has not changed in the past 3,000 years, which is enough to show that it has not been artificially selected. The Chinese Pastoral Dog is also a natural dog breed that has been developed in the ancient agricultural society in China. The unique appearance of some dog breeds in Europe is the result of artificial breeding in recent centuries.
Cross-breeding offspring of dingo and stray dogs
The Chinese Pastoral Dog has three shades of milky white, yellow and black, and the Australian Wild Dog is also the same. But the vast majority of the auberge is yellow, which may reflect the fact that its genetic diversity is lower than that of the earth dog.
The Dingo is a miracle, the East Asians did not do the colonization of Australia, the East Asian dogs did. Wild dogs were also invasive when they first entered Australia, leading to the extinction of a large number of native marsupials. But now, it has been accepted by the Australian government, and many states have listed it as a protected animal.
However, this miracle is disappearing, and after the arrival of European colonists, purebred Australian dingoes have become less and less common due to interbreeding with stray dogs they brought with them. The cousin of the Australian wild dog, the Polynesian native dog, disappeared because he was mixed with dogs from Europe.
A wild dog on Fraser Island has a mark on its ears
If we don't take action, it won't be long before the Dingo becomes no different from the average stray dog. Now, the Australian government has taken measures to protect purebred wild dogs of unpolluted ancestry such as Fraser Island and the Tanan Desert.