Australian Aboriginals cared for a dingo’s grave for decades

澳大利亚原住民数十年来一直守护着一只澳洲野犬的坟墓

A thousand years ago, the ancestors of today’s Barkindji people carefully buried a dingo (or garli, in the Barkindji language) in a mound of shells. Archaeologists recently studied the burial in what’s now New South Wales, Australia. They found that the Barkindji ancestors had buried the dingo with the same care and ceremony as any beloved human member of the community and looked after the grave for centuries. The burial reveals that dingoes were, as Australian Museum and University of Sydney archaeologist and study co-author Amy Way puts it, “deeply valued and loved” by ancient people in Australia.

一千年前，现今巴金吉人（Barkindji）的祖先将一只澳洲野犬（在巴金吉语中称为 garli）小心翼翼地埋葬在一个贝壳堆中。考古学家最近对位于现今澳大利亚新南威尔士州的这处墓葬进行了研究。他们发现，巴金吉人的祖先以对待社区中受人爱戴的成员同样的关怀和仪式埋葬了这只野犬，并守护了这座坟墓数百年。正如澳大利亚博物馆和悉尼大学的考古学家、该研究的合著者艾米·韦（Amy Way）所言，这一墓葬表明，澳洲野犬在古代澳大利亚人心中是“深受珍视和爱戴的”。

The long-lost dingo

被遗忘的澳洲野犬

Five years ago, Barkindji Elder Uncle Badger Bates and National Parks and Wildlife Service archaeologist Dan Witter saw bones eroding out of a road cut in Kinchega National Park, an area along the Baaka, or Darling River, in New South Wales, Australia. Badger recognized the bones as a dingo, lying on its left side in what was once a carefully built mound of river mussel shells. At the urging of the Menindee Aboriginal Elders Council, which worried that erosion would end up destroying the dingo bones and any information about the past they contained, a team of archaeologists, working alongside Barkindji elders, excavated and studied the skeleton.

五年前，巴金吉族长者巴杰·贝茨（Uncle Badger Bates）和国家公园与野生动物管理局的考古学家丹·威特（Dan Witter）在澳大利亚新南威尔士州巴卡河（Baaka，即达令河）沿岸的琴切加国家公园（Kinchega National Park）的一处路堑中，发现了因侵蚀而露出的骨骼。巴杰认出这些骨骼属于一只澳洲野犬，它侧卧在曾经精心堆砌的河蚌壳堆中。在梅宁迪（Menindee）原住民长者委员会的敦促下——他们担心侵蚀最终会摧毁这些野犬骨骼及其所蕴含的历史信息——一支考古队与巴金吉族长者合作，对骨架进行了发掘和研究。

The bones turned out to belong to an elderly male dingo, with worn teeth and possible signs of arthritis. Broken and healed bones suggested that he’d lived a tough, active life but also been cared for by people. And the layers of shells around him revealed that generations of Barkindji had tended his grave and ritually “fed” him by adding shells to the mound for centuries after his death.

研究发现，这些骨骼属于一只年迈的雄性澳洲野犬，牙齿磨损，并有疑似关节炎的迹象。骨骼断裂后愈合的痕迹表明，它的一生虽然艰辛且活跃，但也得到了人类的照料。它周围的贝壳层显示，在它死后的几个世纪里，一代又一代的巴金吉人一直在维护它的坟墓，并通过向土堆中添加贝壳来对其进行仪式性的“喂养”。

This is definitely not the first dingo burial ever found in Australia, but it’s farther north and west than any other example. It reveals a far more profound and lasting relationship between ancient people and dingoes than outside researchers, at least, had previously fully realized. “This confirms these traditions were much more widespread than we once thought,” said University of Western Australia specialist Loukas Koungoulos, the lead author of the paper, in a press release.

这绝对不是澳大利亚发现的首例澳洲野犬墓葬，但它比其他任何已知案例的位置都更偏北、更偏西。它揭示了古代人类与澳洲野犬之间存在着比外部研究人员此前所充分认识到的更为深远和持久的关系。西澳大利亚大学的专家、该论文的主要作者卢卡斯·孔古洛斯（Loukas Koungoulos）在新闻稿中表示：“这证实了这些传统比我们曾经认为的要广泛得多。”

Hunting kangaroos and snoozing by the fire

猎捕袋鼠与火边小憩

The dingo’s bones tell their own story. Koungoulos says he was probably between 4 and 7 years old, which would be late middle age for a wild dingo today. Heavily worn teeth were the first hint of the dingo’s senior citizen status, but the ends of his leg bones also showed signs of bone decay, probably thanks to long-term inflammation: possibly something like arthritis. And he was shorter than most wild dingoes, based on the length of his femurs. That’s not unusual—domesticated animals are often shorter than their wild relatives, and it doesn’t take many generations for that to show up—but it could say something interesting about exactly how close wild dingoes got to domestication in the centuries before European colonists wrecked everything.

这只野犬的骨骼讲述着它自己的故事。孔古洛斯说，它去世时大约在4到7岁之间，对于今天的野生澳洲野犬来说，这已是中老年时期。严重磨损的牙齿是它步入“老年”的第一个迹象，但其腿骨末端也显示出骨质退化的迹象，这可能是长期炎症（可能是关节炎）所致。根据股骨长度判断，它比大多数野生澳洲野犬都要矮小。这并不罕见——驯化动物通常比它们的野生亲属矮小，且这种变化只需几代时间就会显现——但这可能揭示了一个有趣的现象：在欧洲殖民者破坏一切之前的几个世纪里，野生澳洲野犬究竟在多大程度上接近了驯化。

At some point, the dingo had suffered a broken rib and lower leg. Koungoulos suggests the injuries look like the aftermath of a kangaroo kick and may have happened on a hunt. The injuries themselves aren’t too surprising; wild dingoes hunt kangaroos, and Aboriginal hunters worked with dingoes the same way people in other parts of the world have hunted with dogs for millennia. What’s more striking is that the two injuries were long-since healed. Somebody nursed this dingo back to health after his kangaroo encounter. “What stands out about garli is that he was old and well-cared-for,” said Koungoulos. “The healed injuries, worn teeth, and careful burial tell us that this animal lived a long life alongside people, and that his death was marked intentionally and with respect.”

这只野犬曾遭受过肋骨和下肢骨折。孔古洛斯认为，这些伤痕看起来像是被袋鼠踢伤的结果，可能发生在狩猎过程中。伤势本身并不令人惊讶；野生澳洲野犬会猎捕袋鼠，而原住民猎人与野犬的合作方式，与世界其他地区的人类几千年来与狗共同狩猎的方式如出一辙。更引人注目的是，这两处伤口早已愈合。在它遭遇袋鼠袭击后，有人照顾它恢复了健康。“关于这只 garli 最突出的一点是，它年事已高且得到了很好的照顾，”孔古洛斯说，“愈合的伤口、磨损的牙齿和精心准备的墓葬告诉我们，这只动物在人类身边度过了漫长的一生，而它的离世也得到了人们庄重且充满敬意的纪念。”

How dingoes became beloved community members

澳洲野犬如何成为受人爱戴的社区成员

People have lived in this part of Australia for at least 40,000 years, and the oldest traces of humans on the continent date to 65,000 years ago. But dingoes are relative newcomers; the first dingoes arrived on Australia’s shores between 3,500 and 5,000 years ago: just a relative handful of domestic dogs that tagged along with seafarers from New Guinea, according to genetic studies. But that small starting population went wild, both literally and figuratively. And, of course, they’re undeniably friend-shaped.

人类在澳大利亚这一地区居住至少已有4万年，而该大陆上最古老的人类痕迹可追溯至6.5万年前。但澳洲野犬是相对的“新来者”；根据基因研究，第一批澳洲野犬在3500到5000年前抵达澳大利亚海岸：它们只是跟随来自新几内亚的航海者而来的少数家犬。但这一小群初始种群在字面意义和象征意义上都回归了野性。当然，它们无疑长着一副“好朋友”的模样。

It didn’t take Australia’s First Nations peoples long to bond with the dingoes, finding a place for them in their creation stories and in their communities. “These creatures were the first non-humans who answered back, came when called, helped in the hunt, slept with people, and learned to understand some of the vocabulary of human languages,” wrote anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose in her book Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. “People gave them names, fitted them into the wider kinship structure, and took care of dead dingoes in the same way they took care of dead people.”

澳大利亚原住民没花多久就与澳洲野犬建立了联系，并在他们的创世神话和社区中为它们找到了位置。“这些生物是第一种会回应、随叫随到、协助狩猎、与人同眠，并学会理解部分人类语言词汇的非人类生物，”人类学家黛博拉·伯德·罗斯（Deborah Bird Rose）在她的著作《野犬之梦：爱与灭绝》（Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction）中写道，“人们给它们起名字，将它们纳入更广泛的亲属结构中，并像对待逝去的人类一样照顾死去的野犬。”

The Baaka dingo is proof of just how deeply dingoes had worked their way into people’s hearts and lives by around a thousand years ago. Radiocarbon dating of the freshwater mussel shells reveals that the dingo’s burial mound was built between 916 and 963 years ago, around the same time the dingo died. But layers of shells kept being added over the centuries, in what Barkindji elders describe as a “feeding” ritual meant to honor the dead dingo as one of the community’s own ancestors.

这只巴卡河野犬证明了大约一千年前，澳洲野犬就已经深深融入了人们的心灵和生活。对淡水贻贝壳的放射性碳测年显示，该野犬的墓冢建于916至963年前，大约与它死亡的时间吻合。但在随后的几个世纪里，人们不断地添加贝壳层，巴金吉族长者将其描述为一种“喂养”仪式，旨在将这只死去的野犬尊为社区的一位祖先。