When readers browse the ** of the Australian dingo, an exclamation can't help but burst out of their mouths: "Isn't this the Ah Huang next door?""The Australian dingo is similar to the Chinese pastoral dog native to China, so that many netizens have said that the Chinese pastoral dog may be the distant ancestor of the Australian dingo. Some people believe that some Chinese pastoral dogs were introduced to Australia and then released back into the wild, and evolved into the overlord that is now sweeping Australia - Australian dingo. Does that make you feel confident?
An Australian dingo on Fraser Island.
However, modern scientific research has shown that this view is actually not accurate. Below, combined with the research in the field of molecular genetics of domestic dogs in the academic community in the past ten years, I will explore the origin of the Australian dingo and reveal the true relationship between it and the Chinese pastoral dog.
Wild dogs go down to the South Seas.
Who are the ancestors of the dingo?First, genetic analysis reveals a fascinating story: its genes are closer to those of domestic dogs that live with humans than to wolves in the wilderness. In other words, once domesticated wolves became domestic dogs, and some domestic dogs rejoined Australian nature and evolved into today's dingo.
Through genetic testing, we found that dogs worldwide are divided into six major mitochondrial clades (a f), with a total of 51 haplotypes. Mitochondria are inherited from the maternal line, while homomitochondrial haplotypes are inherited from a common maternal ancestor. Twenty per cent of all dingoes, as well as New Guinea singing dogs, belong to the mitochondrial A29 haplogroup, meaning they share a common "super grandmother". This mysterious and ancient bloodline, like a delicate story, adds a touch of mystery to the origin of the dingo. 
New Guinea singing dog.
Outside of Oceania, this unique haplotype is found only in dog breeds east of the Himalayas, with 29% of A29 in Chinese pastoral dogs, 1% in Southeast Asian native dogs, and 12% in Bornean dogs. In addition, this unique haplotype is also present in some northern dog breeds such as Alaskan dogs, huskies, and Siberian Huskies.
Considering all dogs in 1The fact that it was domesticated in South China 60,000 years ago is a vivid picture of the migration of the dingo: from South China, through Southeast Asia, through the Malay Archipelago, through New Guinea, and finally to Australia.
So, when and how did the dingo set foot on Australian soil?In academic circles, there was a popular view that was jokingly called the "Austronesian Theory".
A dingo caught a fish on Fraser Island.
By the time of the Neolithic Age, Austronesians had mastered advanced seafaring techniques and dominated countless islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, including New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island. At the same time, Austronesians are also good breeders of dogs.
This assumption is consistent with archaeological findings, with the earliest found dingo remains dating back about 3,300 years from Mandura Caves in south-eastern Western Australia. The Austronesian conquest of the Polynesian islands was about 3,000 years ago.
However, the "Austronesian Say" is not without its flaws. First of all, Australia is not an Austronesian territory. Although Austronesians once set foot in Australia, they did not put down roots in the land because of the indigenous people of the land. Aboriginal Australians belong to the brown race, about 6They migrated from East Africa along the coast of the Indian Ocean 50,000 years ago, while the Austronesians belonged to East Asians. However, the fact that Austronesians did not succeed in colonizing Australia does not mean that their dogs also failed to thrive in the land.
The migration map of the Austronesians only bypasses Australia.
The second dilemma arose when scientists sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of Polynesian dogs. The results showed that the dogs belonged to two haplotypes, ARC 1 and ARC 2, which did not match the A29 of the dingo. However, the most critical third dilemma has emerged. Through the analysis of the nucleus and mitochondrial DNA of the dingo, we know that they have two main branches: the northwestern and southeastern Australian wilds. The divergence between the two has lasted for 8,300 years, while the separation of the South East Australian wild and New Guinea singing dogs has only been 7,800 years old. This means that dingoes were not born on the Australian continent, but more likely formed in another part of Oceania (most likely New Guinea) and then parted ways to make their separate journeys towards Australia. Moreover, this happened 8,000 years ago, much earlier than the expansion of the Austronesians. This directly overturns the "Austronesian theory". Scientists also conducted an in-depth analysis of the Y chromosome inherited by the Australian dingo in the paternal line and found that there are two Y chromosome haplotypes: H3 and H60. H3 has been found in both East Asia and Northern Europe, while H60 is a mutation originating from East Asian H5. Both the dingo and the New Guinea singing dog in northeastern Australia exhibit H60, while the western part of Australia has only H3, and the southern part of Australia has both but H3 is dominant. 
The results of the study of the Y chromosome of an Australian dingo in the Nullarbor Plain also confirm that the ancestors of the Australian dingo originated in East Asia, and the New Guinea singing dog was a sister group, and the process of entering Australia showed a two-line vein.
After dogs were domesticated in southern China, the speed at which they spread was amazing. In just 2000 years, they swept across Eurasia (1The remains of a 40,000-year-old European dog are proof). Similarly, they quickly reached the southernmost tip of Asia, during the Ice Age (120,000 years ago) the sea level was low, and the Malay Peninsula and the Sunda Islands became a landmass.
Today, however, the Sunda Islands and New Guinea have long been separated, with the strait in between being at least 50 kilometers wide. Wild dogs are not able to swim this far, and must have been able to complete this journey by boat. The most likely is that the ancestors of the Sunda Islands may have crossed the ocean to New Guinea in a rudimentary boat, and dogs accompanied them on this voyage.
The land and sea patterns of Southeast Asia and Oceania during the southern crossing of the dingo.
In Oceania, there is a lack of large carnivores capable of restraining wild dogs. During that period, New Guinea, mainland Australia and some islands in the Torres Strait were still connected (separated about 8,500 to 6,500 years ago), allowing dingoes to spread rapidly in these areas, although the inhabitants who introduced them did not survive there.
Aboriginal Australians may have been quick to adopt dingoes and help them spread across the land. From then on, dingoes and singing dogs were cut off from the outside until the arrival of European colonists.
The appearance of the dingo is a testament to the fact that the expansion of the dog population is driven by humans, but not dependent on humans. As Austronesians failed to establish themselves in Australia, the fruits of Neolithic civilizations, such as agriculture, chickens and pigs, did not take root in the land, but dogs quietly crossed the continent long before these civilizations and survived in unique ways to this day.
The dingo is said to be untamable, but it is still bred by people.
There is also a hidden clue to the origin of the Australian dingo before the Neolithic period. An AMY28 gene is present in both wolves and dogs, and this gene is involved in amylase synthesis. With the advent of the Neolithic Age, the cultivation industry flourished, and humans began to enjoy the abundance of food, which also led to a significant increase in the number of AMY28 gene copies in dogs living with humans. However, similar to dog breeds such as wolves and huskies, dingoes have only two copies of the AMY28 gene, showing that they have a relatively weak ability to digest starch. This circumstantial evidence further reveals the unique development path of the Australian dingo before the Neolithic period, which is clearly different from those dogs that share agricultural civilization with humans. In this land isolated by Oceania, the Australian dingo silently carries an ancient and wonderful history with its unique characteristics and way of survival. The fate of the left-behind dogs
The Australian dingo crossed the South Seas, and their ancestors who remained in South China and a part of the South East Asian continent can be considered the closest relatives of the Australian dingo. In the 90s of the 20th century, many canine experts adhered to this view, considering both the New Guinea singing dog and the Thai dog (Southeast Asian dingo) as the same species as the Australian wild dog. Correspondingly, the Chinese earth dog has become their close relative. 
The Hounds of the Iban of Borneo, however, have been completely overturned by the conclusions of genetic analysis, as it underestimates the ability of dogs and their owners, humans, to migrate. Over the past few thousand years, there have been several large-scale migrations in Southeast Asia, at least three of which have had a profound impact on the genetic makeup of the dog population in the region. The first migration was the migration of Austronesians. The Austronesians brought the dogs of Southeast Asia to the distant Polynesian islands and New Zealand, and these dogs were the close relatives of the Polynesian native dog, the Australian wild dog. However, as there were already Aboriginal people and wild dogs on the Australian mainland, the Austronesians and their dogs came too late to successfully colonize. New Guinea becomes a common transit point for the migration of Australian dingos and Polynesian dogs, so there are both mitochondrial haplotype A29 (20%) for Australian dingos and haplotype arc 1 (7% for Polynesian dogs). 
Dog migration routes in Southeast Asia and Oceania, and mitochondrial haplotype ratios everywhere.
The second migration took place during the migration period of the Dongtai people. From the Yanhuang period to the Qin and Han dynasties, the Dongtai people continued to move from southern China to Southeast Asia in order to find a new living space, and the original dogs were basically replaced by the dogs of the Dongtai people. The Y chromosome haplotype H60 of the Australian dingo is a mutant of East Asian H5 and they share a common paternal ancestor. However, H5 is now very rare in Southeast Asia and relatively common in Taiwan. This indicates that the paternal descendants of the ancestors of the Australian dingo are extremely rare on the Southeast Asian continent, and only on islands such as Taiwan still remain. The matrilineal haplotype A29 of the Australian dingo is still present in East and Southeast Asia, but analysis of longer mitochondrial DNA sequences has found differences between A29 in Asia and A29 in Oceania. This means that, although they are both A29 ancestors (originated from 160,000 years ago, the descendants of the A29 she-wolf in South China, but they do not belong to the same group. It can be seen that the latest maternal ancestor of the Australian dingo is extinct in Asia. 
The Australian dingo skeleton displayed in the Anatomy Museum of the Royal Veterinary College is the migration of Chinese for the third time. Chinese scholars have found that 7000 to 2000 years ago, dogs in the Yellow River and Yangtze River basins in China basically belong to the mitochondrial A1B subclade (some articles write A2), and the Australian dingo and Polynesian native dogs are all from this subclade. However, today's Chinese pastoral dogs rarely have the A1B subclade.
After the Han Dynasty, a large number of dogs from the border areas poured in, and the dogs in the original Central Plains were largely replaced. Although the Australian dingo comes from East Asia, it is a descendant of the native dog of East Asia that migrated south, and the Chinese pastoral dog is the descendant of the latecomer, and the two are not directly related.
The evolution of different paths
According to genetic analysis, the dingo, like the African Bassengui, belongs to the basal group of dogs. The so-called basal taxa are branches that diverged early in the evolution of dogs and were located near their common ancestor. This means that dingos represent a distinctively isolated population of early undifferentiated dogs, distantly related to any of today's domestic dogs.
Chinese Pastoral Dog.
In ancient times, there had been small-scale genetic exchange between dogs from the East and the West, but the dingo has been in isolation for 8,000 years. Therefore, although the Chinese pastoral dog looks similar to the Australian dingo, its relationship with the Australian dingo is even more distant than that of the Chihuahua, Pomeranian, VIP, Corgi, and other strange-looking dog breeds. Some readers may not be convinced, since the Australian dingo and the Chinese pastoral dog are not close relatives, then why do they look so similar?This is because they have not undergone artificial selection, dogs will evolve like this under natural selection, and wolves in southern Asia also look similar, a phenomenon called parallel evolution. Judging from the early remains of the dingo, its morphology has not changed in the last 3,000 years, which is enough to show that it has not undergone artificial selection. The Chinese pastoral dog is also a natural dog breed developed in the ancient agricultural society of China. The unique appearance of some dog breeds in Europe is the result of artificial breeding in recent centuries.
The offspring of a cross between an Australian dingo and a stray dog.
There are three color types of Chinese pastoral dogs: milky white, yellow, and black, and so is the Australian dingo. However, the vast majority of the wild 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 colonize Australia, but the dogs of East Asia did. Dingoes were also an invasive species when they first entered Australia, leading to the extinction of a large number of native marsupials. But now, it has been accepted into Australia**, and many states have listed it as a protected animal.
However, this miracle is disappearing, and after the arrival of European colonists, purebred dingoes have become increasingly rare due to crossbreeding with the stray dogs they brought with them. The cousin of the dingo, the Polynesian dog, disappeared because it was mixed with dogs from Europe.
A wild dog on Fraser Island has markings on its ears.
If we don't take action, it won't be many years before dingoes become indistinguishable from ordinary strays. Now, Australia has taken measures to protect purebred wild dogs whose bloodlines are not contaminated on Fraser Island and Tanan Desert.