950-year-old burial of a pet dingo reveals unique archaeological evidence of humans ritually 'feeding' a grave

A 950-year-old dingo burial in Australia reveals clear archaeological evidence of humans ritually "feeding" an animal's grave for centuries, a new study reports.

The symbolic feeding involved river mussels and continued for roughly 500 years, radiocarbon dating showed. This suggests that the people who buried the dingo — namely, ancestors of the Aboriginal Barkindji people, whose traditional lands surround the Darling River in western New South Wales — profoundly valued the animal and passed on this care to subsequent generations, researchers say.

"It's a similar practice to what we see in many other cultures where descendants return to shrines and ancestral sites over the generations to bring gifts and offerings to the deceased," study co-author Amy Way, a research archaeologist at the University of Sydney and the Australian Museum, told Live Science in an email. "It tells us that this relationship is really strong and retained through time."

The dingo was buried in a pile of discarded mussel shells called a midden. This was not unusual for Barkindji ancestors, because they tamed dingoes to keep as pets and hunting helpers, and mussels were a common food that left heaps of shells, said study first author Loukas Koungoulos, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Western Australia. However, this is the first time that researchers have interpreted the addition of mussel shells to a midden as "feeding," thanks to Barkindji Elders' input.

"It is the first time that we have an Aboriginal perspective as to why people kept adding mussel shells to the site after the burial occurred," Koungoulos told Live Science in an email.

Koungoulos, Way and their colleagues excavated the dingo at the request of the Menindee Aboriginal Elders Council. They worked alongside Barkindji custodians to analyze the burial, which was identified 25 years ago by a Barkindji Elder named Uncle Badger Bates and National Parks and Wildlife Service archaeologist Dan Witter.

"The dingo skull had eroded away since it was first identified in the early 2000s, and so the Elders Council felt it was very important to conserve the rest of the skeleton by working with archaeologists, before it too was lost to time and floods," Way said.

A close examination of the dingo revealed that it was male and between 4 and 7 years old when it died sometime between 916 and 963 years ago. What remained of the skeleton was well preserved, though some bones showed light bite marks from a scavenging predator. The teeth were heavily worn due to the dingo's relatively long life, and the right ribs and one leg carried signs of healed traumatic injuries that were consistent with being kicked by a kangaroo.

The dingo likely survived and recovered from these injuries thanks to the care of Barkindji ancestors, according to the study, published Monday (May 18) in the journal Australian Archaeology.

The researchers dated four mussel shell fragments from the midden, three of which were several hundred years younger than the dingo's remains. The study proposes that mussel shells were added to the burial by generations of Barkindji people to honor and symbolically feed the dingo, known as a "garli" in the Barkindji language.

"The idea, as explained to me by the Barkindji, is that it involved a cross-generational remembering of this garli ancestor, which specifically involved generation after generation returning to the burial site to add mussel shells to the midden that was initiated at the time of the dingo's burial," Way said.

The results expand a region along the Darling River where archaeologists already knew that Aboriginal ancestors buried dingos but where they hadn't documented the feeding practice.

"It's a way of remembering important connections with the past," Way said.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:05 a.m. ET on May 19 to note that this burial is the first known archaeological evidence of people ritually "feeding" an animal burial in a midden, but not first evidence of humans ritually "feeding" a grave anywhere in the world, as was previously stated.