Australian aborigines cared for dingo graves for many years

1,000 years ago, the ancestors of today’s Barkindji people buried a dingo (or garli, in the Barkindji language) in a pile of shells.

Recently, archaeologists investigated the burial in what is now New South Wales, Australia. They discovered that Barkindji’s parents buried the dingo with the same care and tradition as any loved one in the village and looked after the grave for hundreds of years. The burials reveal that dingoes were, as archaeologists from the Australian Museum and University of Sydney and co-author Amy Way put it, “very popular” with ancient Australians.

A long lost dingo

Five years ago, Barkindji Elder Uncle Badger Bates and National Parks and Wildlife Service archaeologist Dan Witter saw bones floating along a road in Kinchega National Park, an area on the banks of the Baaka River, or Darling River, in Western Australia. Badger recognized that the bones were those of a dingo, lying on the left side of what had once been a pile of river snail shells.

At the urging of the Menindee Council of Aboriginal Elders, who were concerned that erosion would destroy the dingo bones and any historical information, a team of archaeologists, working with Barkindji elders, excavated and studied the bones. The bones were found to be that of an older male dingo, with mature teeth and signs of arthritis. Broken and healed bones indicate that they lived a hard and active life and were cared for by people.

And the shell fragments around him revealed that generations of Barkindji had cared for his grave and ritually fed him by adding more shells to the pile over the years after his death. This is not the first dingo burial ever found in Australia, but it is further north and west than any other example. It reveals a deeper and more enduring relationship between ancient humans and dingoes than foreign researchers, at least, have previously realized.