About a thousand years ago, someone on the banks of an outback river loved a dingo enough to bury him like family.
Now that Darling River grave is rewriting what scientists thought they knew about the bond between First Nations people and dingoes in inland Australia.
Archaeologists working with traditional Barkindji custodians have studied the skeleton of a male dingo, or garli, found in a riverside midden – a man-made mound of shells and cultural material – at Kinchega National Park in western NSW.
Radiocarbon dating shows the dingo was buried between 963 and 916 years ago.
It marks the first time a dingo from this part of the Darling River has been directly dated, and it pushes known dingo burial traditions far beyond southeast Australia.
To Barkindji people, the river is the Baaka, a living line of connection to Country, ancestors and stories.
The midden appears to have been created around the time the dingo was laid to rest, then "fed" with river mussel shells that were left at the site for centuries.
Experts say this kind of ritual "feeding" has never been seen before in the archaeological record anywhere in the world.
Barkindji Elders believe the ongoing offerings were a way of continuing to care for and honour garli as an ancestor, generation after generation.
"While Barkindji people have always known about this cultural practice, this discovery is really powerful because it provides new details on the depth of that relationship between Barkindji people and dingoes," said project lead Dr Amy Way, an Australian Museum archaeologist and University of Sydney lecturer.
"If garli were buried with the same care and respect we see for human ancestors ... it tells us these animals were profoundly valued and loved."
Dingo specialist Loukas Koungoulos, from the University of Western Australia, said the bones showed the animal lived to an old age for a wild dingo – between four and seven years – and his death was marked intentionally "with respect".
"Dingoes like this garli weren't simply tolerated around camps. They were tamed, lived with people and were embedded in daily life."
The research – involving the University of Sydney, the Australian Museum, the Australian National University and the University of WA– was funded by the Australian Museum Foundation and published in Australian Archaeology.
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