Dingoes are found across most of the Australian continent Dominic Jeanmaire/Getty Images/iStockphoto Analysis of ancient DNA from suggests that Australia’s native wild dogs arrived in two waves of migration between 3000 and 8000 years ago and show little evidence of interbreeding with domestic dogs. at Queensland University of Technology in Australia and her colleagues examined 42 ancient dingo specimens. They ultimately obtained nine full genomes, including the oldest Australian genome ever sequenced for any species, as well as mitochondrial DNA from 16 animals.
Read more Advertisement The retrieved DNA ranged in age from 400 to 2700 years old and came from across the continent. The researchers compared this ancient data with DNA from 11 modern dingoes, six New Guinea singing dogs and 372 domestic dogs, wolves and other canids that had been obtained by previous studies. The analysis confirms that the two main Australian populations of dingoes – one concentrated on the east coast and another on the west – had already diverged by at least 3000 years ago.
The east coast dingoes are more closely related to New Guinea singing dogs than they are to the western dingoes, possibly indicating two distinct migrations of dingoes into Australia. In the absence of ancient New Guinea singing dog DNA, the researchers couldn’t rule out that the singing dogs are descended from dingoes that migrated from Australia to New Guinea. A monthly celebration of the biodiversity of our planet�.
