The arrival and impacts of the dingo

Abstract

Within the Holocene, until 3500 years ago, the marsupial thylacine and Tasmanian devil were Australia's largest non-human mammalian predators. They became extinct on the mainland soon after the arrival of the dingo, as did a flightless bird, the Tasmanian native hen, but all persisted in the absence of dingoes on the island of Tasmania until the 20th century. Based on the size of Tasmanian thylacines, which were larger than dingoes, it has been argued that dingoes were unlikely to have caused the extinction of mainland thylacines; smaller predators rarely kill larger ones. In addition, concurrent increases in human population density and the introduction of new technologies may have caused these extinctions. However, mainland thylacines were considerably smaller than Tasmanian thylacines and thus may have been more susceptible to direct killing by dingoes than has previously been considered. The arrival of the dingo also coincided with a shift in the archaeozoological record from larger mammalian species to those of smaller body sizes. These effects accord with the dingo's effects in contemporary ecosystems and are also consistent with the changes in human subsistence patterns that might be expected with an increase in human population density and depletion of large prey. Attributing these changes n faunal communities and human subsistence patterns to one cause, however, is problematic because the arrival of dingoes and the intensification of the human economy were not independent events.