Aboriginal Australians are known to have routinely taken dingo pups from wild dens to rear as companion animals, with the mature canids typically returning to the bush to mate. Available accounts emphasise the strong emotional bonds between Indigenous people and “camp dingoes”, which were essentially raised as though they were human. Yet despite the closeness of human–canine relations in Australia, it is widely contended that Aboriginal people did not domesticate dingoes. The accepted thinking is that while the dingoes lived part of their lives with humans, they were ultimately “free agents” that foraged and reproduced independently. Here, I propose that the Aboriginal practice of raising wild‐caught dingo pups generated a distinct population of free‐roaming adult dingoes that were socialised to interact with humans and may have remained loosely associated with them. I suggest that this hitherto unrecognised dingo ecotype, which should not be thought of as truly wild, yielded most of the pups taken from the bush by humans. Contrary to received wisdom, therefore, Aboriginal peoples’ interactions with dingoes involved management and domestication processes, but not as conventionally defined (i.e., controlled breeding, artificial selection).

中文翻译：

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野狗和驯化

众所周知，原住民的澳大利亚人通常将野狗作为野兽从野外带到后方，而成熟的犬科动物通常会回到灌木丛中交配。可用的账目强调了土著人与“营地犬”之间的强烈情感纽带，这些纽带本质上就好像是人类一样。然而，尽管澳大利亚与人与人之间的关系紧密，但普遍认为，土著人民没有驯养丁格犬。公认的想法是，虽然野狗与人类生活在一起，但他们最终还是“自由人”，他们独立觅食和繁殖。这里，我建议，饲养野狗的原住民做法产生了一群自由漫游的成年野狗，这些成年野狗社交化后可以与人类互动，并且可能与它们之间存在松散的联系。我建议，这种迄今尚未被认识的丁戈生态型，不应被认为是真正的野生型，产生了人类从丛林中带走的大多数幼崽。因此，与公认的智慧相反，原住民与野狗的互动涉及管理和驯化过程，但没有按照传统定义（即控制繁殖，人工选择）。