I had thought that there were no placental mammals which are truely native to Australia? If this is the case, then the dingoes had to come in the same boats as the human Australian aboriginals, right? So dingos have to be feral, rather than wild.
Or are you saying that the proto-aboriginals, while they were still on mainland Asia, bred the dingoes as a breed of dogs of their own?
Dingoes only arrived in Australia about 4000 ya. Aborigines have been in Australia about 50, 000 years.
Dingoes are a SE Asian breed, and were traded with Aborigines by Indonesian and Malaysian fishermen. There are still plenty of dingoes living as house pets throughout SE Asia. Fossils and pictures show that they have always appeared to be dingoes and show no signs of changing. They aren’t atavistic wild dogs that have bred back to yellow dog form as a result of going feral. The dingo breed standard is a small yellow dog, just as the labrador standard is a big black dog. They have been kept in a state of deomestication in that form for at least 10, 000 years.
Yes there are feral dingoes in Australia today, and probably have been since shortly after they arrived in Australia. But there are feral podles today as well. That doesn’t tell us that dogs breed back to a poddle form if left to their own devices. It only tells us that poddles, like all breeds, will breed true. The same is true of dingoes and other yellow dogs. With no other genetic input they continue to breed true to form.
And I clearly am descended from someone who couldn’t spell ‘poodle’.