The origin of Singers is a mystery. They had to be transported to the island by humans, as even at lowest sea levels it was too far between neighboring islands for a small dog to swim, but no one knows where the ancestral Singers came from or exactly when they arrived. We know from the remains of non-native animals on islands of the West Pacific that people were transporting wild animals between the islands 20,000 years ago. The oldest dog fossil in Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a single tooth dated to about 5,500 years ago. A single tooth can not identify the type of dog it came from, One months old puppies of the New Guinea Singing Dog although the tooth's size can provide some indication of the dog's size. This tooth was within the size range for Singers, so we know there were Singer-size dogs in PNG at least 5,500 years ago. Dogs could have been present long before that, but they have just not yet been discovered. PNG is situated just below the equator, north of Australia. Scientific archaeological and paleontological work has been sparse in the high mountains of this forbidding island, the second largest island in the world (only Greenland is larger). So there probably are many discoveries still to be made there.
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