Thanks for your contributions to the article New Guinea Singing Dog. I have a book here which might help you. It's this one: [1]. Corbett says that all Canis lupus dingo evolved from southern gray wolves in what is now north-central Thailand and surrounding areas. He says that "the evolutionary process was one of domestication", so this is clearly either a domestic dog or a domestic dog that has reverted to life as a wild animal, as with the Australian Dingo. He also says that whoever the cultures were that originally were involved in this process, the distribution from there was surely done by Austronesian peoples during their prehistoric diaspora, much later than the populating of peoples such as the native Australians and New Guineans. The Austronesians are those people who today include the Indonesians, Phillipinos, and to a certain extent the ancestors of Malagassy people, even the native Taiwanese, and many other places in that region. They brought these dogs with them wherever they settled, traded, or even possibly got shipwrecked and died but not before getting at least one pregnant female close enough to make it to some island or landmass in the huge area they covered, and they are still there and recognizable as such by experts in dingo morphology like Corbett. Of all these dogs, he says, the youngest of all is probably the New Guinea Singing Dog, which is only about 1,000 years old, which is very different from what is stated in the article. I'll give you the exact quotation here:
"The distribution and antiquity of dingo fossils throughout Asia and Australia fits in with the seafarer theory. The earliest date in island southeast Asia are at the Niah Cave in Sarawak after 4,500 BP and in Timor between 3,500 and 2,500 BP. In New Guinea, on present evidence, dingoes (inappropriately known as the New Guinea Singing Dog, Canis hallstromi are less than 1,000 years old in the highlands and no more than 2,000 years old on the south coast."
Please understand that Laurie Corbett seems to be the world's leading expert on the subject of dingoes and is always cited in any expansive work on the topic.
The article you are working on is, indeed, a mess and I thank you again for your efforts on it. Notice the influenence of a group of people who, while quite mutually antagonistic, all seemed in their own different ways to be intent on promoting or helping the species by not letting the article clearly state that they are simply a local "breed" or more appropriately landrace of dog from that area. I don't know if you are one of these or not, but if so I'd like to say that please let's not overplay the extent to which there really is any doubt among experts that they are a local varient of the common southeast Asian domestic dog, and there is not really all that much mystery about them. Chrisrus (talk) 04:02, 24 March 2011 (UTC)