Interesting overview of dingoes. While they're not exactly dogs, or at least not the same species as domestic dogs, the difference is kind of subtle. They do resemble dogs more than other wild canids do. One might very well mistake them for such. It's only when you notice that they're traveling in packs and don't seem to have any humans in charge of them that the difference becomes glaring. What we seem to be looking at is a slightly earlier stage of canine evolution.
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The overview of dingoes in the video was pretty interesting. I'd always thought they were native to Australia but that appears to be wrong - 4,000 years and likely carried there by boats. It makes you wonder if Australian marsupials were a recognized oddity among hunters at the time.
Dingoes do seem to share a number of characteristics with wolves including the fact they're able to interbreed with domestic dogs. You're very likely right they're an earlier form of canine and now I wonder just how much that will affect the breed in the long term? It's likely there'll always be packs of wild dingoes.
They seem native to Australia now because they've gone native as it were, but they weren't always. The fact that there are no dingo fossils in Tasmania is taken as evidence that they arrived after rising water separated Tasmania and the mainland. They're also thought to have caused the extinction of the thylacine. While they would be a competitor species, thylacines didn't completely die out until the 20th century, so there could be more than one factor. Hunters whose family had been in Australia for a while would be accustomed to marsupials. Visitors to the continent would have a different reaction.
They're not exactly the same as wolves but they're analogous. Both essentially live in packs, and they have similar methods for hunting. They've lasted this long because they're adaptable, it seems. If they're not eternal, they do seem like they can survive for quite some time.
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