1k-year-old dingo bones show that it was injured, cared for, and ritually buried

https://www.popsci.com/environment/dingo-bones-ritual-burial-australia/

by gmays • 2 months ago

51 10 2 months ago

The people living there continued to bring river mussel shells to the midden for hundreds of years after the dingo’s death.

Hundreds of years? Damn, that's probably well more than most cultures would afford even beloved pets.

defrost• 2 months ago

To the site in general, where the dingo happened to be buried, rather than to the grave of the dingo.

Midden piles of fresh and saltwater shells abound in Australia - unsurprising given some 60K+ years of occupation by cruising along hunter gatherers.

The north west beaches I'm familiar with have many good fishing and marine food gathering spots and the dunes back from the high tide lines often reveal deep strata layers of shells dumped on a near daily basis over long windows of time.

Rivers are similar with remnants of fish traps (blasted by early Europeans for reasons of both navigation and moving the natives along) having waste layers (fish bones, freshwater shells, etc) nearby.

stevenwoo• 2 months ago

We really can’t know why, maybe it was continuous or maybe it was to have the dingos spirit guide their mussel harvest or maybe they wanted their dingo to never be hungry in the afterlife and that particular dingo was forgotten after a generation under accumulated shells, it’s deliberate but that’s all we can conclude.

treis4• 2 months ago

This seems highly suspect. The paper says there's no evidence of burial and the evidence (mussel shells) that humans were involved with the site at all is thin. That they came from a "feeding ritual" seems to be based on nothing more than speculation.

Seems a lot more plausible that it washed up on a river bank during a flood. Or it died next to a river which subsequently changed course.

dwroberts3• 2 months ago

The paper says the exact opposite of what you’re stating

At death, he was deliberately buried in a midden initiated either shortly beforehand or contemporaneously with his burial
The geomorphological setting and sediment properties indicate that a grave was cut into a landform positioned up to 2 m higher than the surrounding scroll plains. [..] The dingo was found in an articulated context below this surface, indicating the presence of a burial cut

treis4• 2 months ago

Layer 1 was the only unit containing identifiable cultural materials and was interpreted as a midden because it appeared to have been formed, at least partially, by anthropic additions of mussel shells. All in situ dingo bones were confined to Layer 1. There were no observable cut or fill features that indicated a hole had been excavated to emplace the Garli
One of the Garli’s caudal vertebrae, recovered directly below the eroding burial, was sampled for AMS radiocarbon dating and returned an age range of 963–916 cal BP (ANU-75935). A freshwater mollusc shell sampled from the central burial block (UNSW-3415) returned an age of 1,178–957 cal BP. Three additional mussel fragments (cf. Velesunio sp.) were dated from Layer 1 of Zone 1 (UNSW-3414), the Garli burial core’s interface with Layer 1 (UNSW-3416), and from sediment within the burial core adjacent to the Garli skeleton itself (SANU-75235). These produced ages several hundred years younger than the Garli

1k-year-old dingo bones show that it was injured, cared for, and ritually buried

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