[calgarymicro]

> The people living there continued to bring river mussel shells to the midden for hundreds of years after the dingo’s death.

Hundreds of years? Damn, that's probably well more than most cultures would afford even beloved pets.

[defrost]

To the site in general, where the dingo happened to be buried, rather than to the grave of the dingo.

Midden piles of fresh and saltwater shells abound in Australia - unsurprising given some 60K+ years of occupation by cruising along hunter gatherers.

The north west beaches I'm familiar with have many good fishing and marine food gathering spots and the dunes back from the high tide lines often reveal deep strata layers of shells dumped on a near daily basis over long windows of time.

Rivers are similar with remnants of fish traps (blasted by early Europeans for reasons of both navigation and moving the natives along) having waste layers (fish bones, freshwater shells, etc) nearby.

[stevenwoo]

We really can’t know why, maybe it was continuous or maybe it was to have the dingos spirit guide their mussel harvest or maybe they wanted their dingo to never be hungry in the afterlife and that particular dingo was forgotten after a generation under accumulated shells, it’s deliberate but that’s all we can conclude.