Arrival of First Australians infographic. Arrival of First Australians infographic. Credit: Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH)
Posted on 07/02/2019 1:19:05 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
New insights into how people first arrived in Australia have been revealed by a group of experts brought together to investigate the continent's deep history.
They used sophisticated modelling to determine not only the likely routes travelled by Aboriginal people tens of thousands of years ago, but also the sizes of groups required for the population to survive in harsh conditions.
The research, published today in two companion papers (one in Scientific Reports and the other in Nature Ecology and Evolution), confirms the theory that people arrived in several large and deliberate migrations by island-hopping to reach New Guinea more than 50,000 years ago.
While many Aboriginal cultures believe people have always been here, others have strong oral histories of ancestral beings arriving from the north...
The papers Early human settlement of Sahul was not an accident and Minimum founding populations for the first peopling of Sahul, were co-authored by scientists from around Australia, including Flinders University, James Cook University, University of Wollongong, University of New South Wales, University of Adelaide, Australian National University, and the CSIRO.
(Excerpt) Read more at eurekalert.org ...
Arrival of First Australians infographic. Arrival of First Australians infographic. Credit: Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH)
I've gotten to the point where I rely on A) the kindness of fellow FReepers and B) Eurekalert for most of the GGG articles. Archaeologica just doesn't cut any longer.
Thus avoiding the controversy over *when* the lastest aboriginal inhabitants arrived, and how many waves of immigrants there were.
So even the aboriginals dumped their criminals on Australia 10,000 years ago!
What kind of boats did these migrants have at their disposal 50,000 years ago? Do these archeologists have any clue what kind of boats/water craft these folks could have constructed?
In another thread, concerning the migration of people to Japan, the archeologists in the parent article denoted a drop in sea levels, thus allowing the flow of migrants to Japan.
Not to step too harshly into the realm of historical speculation, but with the massive glaciation that occurred in the millennium past, and the subsequent drop in sea levels, wouldn't the migration to the Australian continent and surrounding isles be more easily explained as with the Japanese migration, i.e., walking/wading to the new lands?
Thor Heyerdahl constructed a raft, the Kon Tiki from South American reeds and vines to prove trans-Pacific voyages were possible.
Bamboo makes an even better flotation device with its many closed chambers and is still used in rafts in SE Asia today.
Bamboo forest in Japan.
It's trivial primitive technology using vines to bind a simple raft together. Not at all hard to imagine.
This type of "research" can't "confirm" anything.
Yeah, the updated daily turned into updated every 1.5 weeks with repeats of the prior articles. I tried to join the forum over there a couple years ago and got no response. No one has their heart in it anymore.
I think you are both right and wrong. I think there was a land bridge for the most part, But the reality of the Wallace line species phenomenon is real and had to be hopped by water.
And that meant a huge new land called Sunda made up of the joined major Indonesian islands—Sumatra, Borneo, Java, Sulawesi—but it didn't make land all the way to Australia. New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania were all joined together in another massive land named Sahul.
There was still a water gap between these two, as seen here:
We have historical evidence of remarkable voyages in these waters in boats little different from what might have been available to ancient peoples. Lieutenant William Bligh in the launch of HMS Bounty made a voyage of 3,600 nautical miles to Timor with other crewmen of the Bounty. Survivors of HMS Pandora (with some Bounty muniteers as prisoners) made a much shorter voyage from the Great Barrier Reef to Timor.
Polynesian voyages were made throughout the Pacific on boats made of local materials. We will likely discover that such voyages were made by ancient peoples thousands of years ago from Asia to North America and from Europe to North America. The absence of physical evidence have led us to underestimate the sea faring capabilities of these people.
Yeah, the isolationists are a bunch of landlubbers. Even Britain, which was connected to the European mainland until 200,000 years ago, has to have been colonized by sea, repeatedly, and in historical times it has been colonized and/or conquered multiple times (Claudius' cross-channel invasion was the largest until D-Day). One of the scholars of ancient language (I'm drawing a blank, and forget about my finding the book just now) recounted a joke about how the first Britons didn't come in from outside, but were symbolically transformed reindeer.
Since the ocean level was lower during glaciations, any trace of early occupation of Pacific Islands would have been submerged long ago. That's not a permanent condition, but many if not most of the isolated islands are uninhabited, or only sparsely inhabited, and going to one of them for scientific purposes would be expensive and non-trivial.
The repeats, yeah, that bugs me too, appears to be inattentiveness. Sometimes the old way surfaces, with "More about" and a link to a similar story from a different source. But the place has deteriorated.
We have learned how to do archaeology in the Black Sea and we can use these techniques to do the same thing along the Pacific coast of the Americas, Pacific islands, and Australia. It will require better remote sensing technology, since finding ship wrecks via remote camera will not work for the next stage of exploration, but that will come.
Australia has been isolated on all sides by water throughout human times. So, no. Flores Island has produced 800,000 year old artifacts, and has similarly been isolated from the mainland throughout human times. It's not that surprising that, in a world with NO ROADS, humans have been quite comfortable moving themselves great distances by water for a really, really long time.
Perhaps a search for sunken vessels of WWII might also turn up something ancient, but most of the large vessels sank in the western Pacific. There's not even any treasure hunting to speak of that could be undertaken, because most of the gold, silver, and emeralds dug out of Central and South America got shipped to Spain via the Atlantic (or went down in the Atlantic, or got privateered in the Atlantic).
I'd be surprised if it were only one wave. There may have been some good sound solid reason why Australia was unattractive to settlement, but I just have a hard time buying it when someone (or "the consensus") claims this or that landmass has (or had) a population that has been isolated for 10s or even 100s of 1000s of years.
Yes I noticed those also, it used to be fantastic. I was going to offer to help find and post stuff to keep on top of it, but she just never got back to me about my forum membership at all.
It’s changed a lot in the last 20 years.
I’ve been here under a different screen name before you and it’s gone from a discussion board to a posting board.
I’ve always really appreciated your posts. Granted I don’t respond like I use to but it still a joy to read them.
Thank you so much for what you have given to Free Republic. We lucked out by having you here.
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