Hunting dogs down under? On the Aboriginal use of tame dingoes in dietary game acquisition and its relevance to Australian prehistory

•The dingo is a primitive type of dog that arrived in Australia around 5000BP.•Dingoes helped Aboriginal people to catch small animals, often opportunistically.•Aboriginal men also used them to effectively hunt large animals like kangaroo.•Domestic dogs introduced by Europeans were used to hunt in different ways.•Arrival of the dingo was a multifaceted driving force in Holocene dietary breadth. Dingoes are wild canids descended from primitive dogs brought to Australia by humans around approximately 5000BP. Observations of dingoes living with Aboriginal people inspired debate amongst anthropologists and prehistorians over whether they were used to hunt game in prehistoric times. This has resulted in widespread conceptions that dingoes were not of use in “serious” hunts or were limited to assisting the capture of small species only. Assessing the topic through a comprehensive synthesis of historical evidence, we find that dingoes were used often to help procure a wide range of prey species, performing roles from initial detection through to capture. We note in particular that dingoes were used effectively to hunt large taxa like kangaroo, wallaby and emu, primarily in the form of large-scale drives that involved large portions of the community. This has important implications for the understanding of archaeological records during the mid-to-late Holocene in mainland Australia.