Prehistory of Australia
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The prehistory of Australia is the period between the first human habitation of the Australian continent and the
The nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle is no longer considered the dominant nutritional style prior to colonisation, as there is extensive evidence of land management by practices such as complex gardening, cultural burning,[2][3] and in some areas, agriculture,[4][5][6] fish farming,[7][8] and permanent settlements.[9][10][11][12]
Arrival
The earliest evidence of humans in Australia has been variously estimated, with most agreement as of 2018[update] that it dates from between 50,000 and 65,000 years
There is considerable discussion among archaeologists as to the route taken by the first migrants to Australia, widely taken to be ancestors of the modern Aboriginal peoples. Migration took place during the closing stages of the
In the 2013 book First Footprints: The Epic Story of the First Australians, Scott Cane writes that the first wave may have been prompted by the eruption of Toba, and if they arrived around 70,000 years ago, they could have crossed the water from Timor, when the sea level was low – but if they came later, around 50,000 years ago, a more likely route would be through the Moluccas to New Guinea. Given that the likely landfall regions have been under around 50 metres of water for the last 15,000 years, it is unlikely that the timing will ever be established with certainty.[19]
Dating of sites
The minimum widely accepted time-frame for the arrival of humans in Australia is placed at least 48,000 years ago.[20] Many sites dating from this time period have been excavated. In Arnhem Land Madjedbebe (formerly known as Malakunanja II) fossils and a rock shelter have been dated to around 65,000 years old.[14][21] According to mitochondrial DNA research, Aboriginal people reached Eyre Peninsula (South Australia) 49,000-45,000 years ago from both the east (clockwise, along the coast, from northern Australia) and the west (anti-clockwise).[22]: 189
Archaeological evidence indicates human habitation at the upper
Tasmania, which was connected to the continent by a land bridge, was inhabited at least 30,000 years ago.[33][34] Others have claimed that some sites are up to 60,000 years old, but these claims are not universally accepted.[35] Palynological evidence from South Eastern Australia suggests an increase in fire activity dating from around 120,000 years ago. This has been interpreted as representing human activity, but the dating of the evidence has been strongly challenged.[36]
Migration routes and waves
A 2021 study by researchers at the
Phylogenetic data suggests that an early Eastern Eurasian lineage trifurcated somewhere in eastern South Asia, and gave rise to Aboriginal Australians, Papuans, the Andamanese, the AASI, as well as East/Southeast Asians, although Papuans may have also received some gene flow from an earlier group (xOoA), around 2%,[39] next to additional archaic admixture in the Sahul region.[40][41]
According to one study, Papuans could have either formed from a mixture between an East Eurasian lineage and lineage basal to West and East Asians, or as a sister lineage of East Asians with or without a minor basal OoA or xOoA contribution.[42]
A Holocene hunter-gatherer sample (Leang_Panninge) from South Sulawesi was found to be genetically in between Basal-East-Asian and Australo-Papuans. The sample could be modeled as ~50% Papuan-related and ~50% Basal-East Asian-related (Andamanese Onge or Tianyuan). The authors concluded that Basal-East Asian ancestry was far more widespread and the peopling of Insular Southeast Asia and Oceania was more complex than previously anticipated.[43][44][45]
It is unknown how many populations settled in Australia prior to European colonisation. Both "trihybrid" and single-origin hypotheses have received extensive discussion.[46] Keith Windschuttle, known for his belief that Aboriginal pre-history has become politicised, argues that the assumption of a single origin is tied into ethnic solidarity, and multiple entry was suppressed because it could be used to justify white seizure of Aboriginal lands,[47] but this hypothesis is not supported by scientific studies.
Changes c. 4000 years ago
Human genomic differences are being studied to find possible answers, but there is still insufficient evidence to distinguish a "wave invasion model" from a "single settlement" one.[48]
A 2012 paper by Alan J. Redd et al. on the topic of migration from India around 4,000 years ago notes that the indicated influx period corresponds to the timing of various other changes, specifically mentioning "The divergence times reported here correspond with a series of changes in the Australian anthropological record between 5,000 years ago and 3,000 years ago, including the introduction of the dingo; the spread of the Australian Small Tool tradition; the appearance of plant-processing technologies, especially complex detoxification of cycads; and the expansion of the Pama-Nyungan language over seven-eighths of Australia". Although previously linked to the
The
However, a 2016 study in Current Biology by Anders Bergström et al. excluded the Y chromosome as providing evidence for recent gene flow from India into Australia. The study authors sequenced 13 Aboriginal Australian Y chromosomes using recent advances in gene sequencing technology, investigating their divergence times from Y chromosomes in other continents, including comparing the haplogroup C chromosomes. The authors concluded that, although this does not disprove the presence of any Holocene gene flow or non-genetic influences from South Asia at that time, and the appearance of the dingo does provide strong evidence for external contacts, the evidence overall is consistent with a complete lack of gene flow, and points to indigenous origins for the technological and linguistic changes. Gene flow across the island-dotted 150-kilometre (93 mi)-wide Torres Strait, is both geographically plausible and demonstrated by the data, although at this point it could not be determined from this study when within the last 10,000 years it may have occurred - newer analytical techniques have the potential to address such questions.[50]
Advent of fire farming and megafauna extinctions
Archaeological evidence from ash deposits in the Coral Sea indicates that fire was already a significant part of the Australian landscape over 100,000 years BP.[54] Over the past 70,000 years it became more frequent with one explanation being the use by hunter-gatherers as a tool to drive game, to produce a green flush of new growth to attract animals, and to open up impenetrable forest. In The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia, Bill Gammage claims that dense forest became more open sclerophyll forest, open forest became grassland and fire-tolerant species became more predominant: in particular, eucalyptus, acacia, banksia, casuarina and grasses.[55]
The changes to the fauna were even more dramatic: the
The direct cause of the mass extinctions is uncertain: it may have been fire, hunting, climate change or a combination of all or any of these factors. The degree of human agency in these extinctions is still a matter of discussion.
The period from 18,000 to 15,000 BP saw increased aridity of the continent with lower temperatures and less rainfall than currently prevails. Between 16,000 and 14,000 years BP the rate of
From that time on, the Aboriginal Tasmanians were geographically isolated. By 9,000 years BP small islands in Bass Strait, as well as Kangaroo Island were no longer inhabited.
Linguistic and genetic evidence shows that there has been long-term contact between Australians in the far north and the Austronesian people of modern-day New Guinea and the islands, but that this appears to have been mostly trade with a little intermarriage, as opposed to direct colonisation. Macassan praus are also recorded in the Aboriginal stories from Broome to the Gulf of Carpentaria, and there were some semi-permanent settlements established, and cases of Aboriginal settlers finding a home in Indonesia.
Culture and technology
The last 5,000 years were characterised by a general amelioration of the climate and an increase in temperature and rainfall and the development of a sophisticated tribal social structure.[61] The main items of trade were songs and dances, along with flint, precious stones, shells, seeds, spears, food items, etc.
Although it was traditionally thought that Australian Aboriginal people were exclusively
The
The initiation of young boys and girls into adult knowledge was marked by ceremony and feasting. Initiation rites included female genital mutilation,[63] ritual gang raping,[64][dubious ] penile subincision.[65]
Behaviour was governed by strict rules regarding responsibilities to and from uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters as well as in-laws. The kinship systems observed by many communities included a division into moieties, with restrictions on intermarrying dictated by the moiety an individual belonged to.[66]
Describing prehistoric Aboriginal culture and society during her 1999 Boyer Lecture, Australian historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen explained:
"They [...] developed steepling thought-structures – intellectual edifices so comprehensive that every creature and plant had its place within it. They travelled light, but they were walking atlases, and walking encyclopedias of natural history. [...] Detailed observations of nature were elevated into drama by the development of multiple and multi-level narratives: narratives which made the intricate relationships between these observed phenomena memorable.
These dramatic narratives identified the recurrent and therefore the timeless and the significant within the fleeting and the idiosyncratic. They were also very human, charged withDreamtime creatures were not austere divinities, but fallible beings who happened to make the world and everything in it while going about their creaturely business. Traditional Aboriginal culture effortlessly fuses areas of understanding which Europeans 'naturally' keep separate: ecology, cosmology, theology, social morality, art, comedy, tragedy – the observed and the richly imagined fused into a seamless whole."[67]
Infanticide (estimated 30% of newborns, often as means of population and family size control, partly to preserve resources and to enable mobility, as only women carried young children)[68] and cannibalism[69][dubious ] are widely documented in many, but not all regions of the continent.
Political and religious power rested with community elders rather than hereditary chiefs. Disputes were settled communally in accordance with an elaborate system of tribal law. Vendettas and feuds were not uncommon, especially when laws and taboos were broken. Cremation of the dead was practised by 25,000 years ago, possibly before anywhere else on Earth, and early artwork in Koonalda Cave, Nullarbor Plain, has been dated back to 20,000 years ago.[70]
It has been estimated that in 1788 there were approximately half a million
Little interest was shown by white settlers in the bulk of the Aboriginal people, and so little is known of their cultures and languages. Diseases decimated some Indigenous populations when they came into contact with the colonialists, and the
Contact outside Australia
Aboriginal people have no cultural memory of living anywhere outside Australia. Nevertheless, the people living along the northern coastline of Australia, in the
However, trade and intercourse between the separated lands continued across the newly formed
Indonesian "
There was a high degree of cultural exchange, evidenced in
The myths of the people of
Possible link to east Africa
In 1944, a small number of copper coins with Arabic inscriptions were discovered on a beach in Jensen Bay on
See also
- Australian Aboriginal sacred site
- Australian archaeology
- Dreamtime, Aboriginal mythology about Australian prehistory
- European maritime exploration of Australia
- Juukan Gorge caves, destroyed in May 2020
- Lake Mungo remains
- Ten Canoes, a 2006 film about Australian prehistory
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- ^ Genetics and material culture support repeated expansions into Paleolithic Eurasia from a population hub out of Afri, Vallini et al. 2021 (October 15, 2021) Quote: "Taken together with a lower bound of the final settlement of Sahul at 37 kya (the date of the deepest population splits estimated by 1) it is reasonable to describe Papuans as either an almost even mixture between East Asians and a lineage basal to West and East Asians occurred sometimes between 45 and 38kya, or as a sister lineage of East Asians with or without a minor basal OoA or xOoA contribution. "
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- ^ Genetics and material culture support repeated expansions into Paleolithic Eurasia from a population hub out of Afri, Vallini et al. 2021 (October 15, 2021) Quote: "Taken together with a lower bound of the final settlement of Sahul at 37 kya (the date of the deepest population splits estimated by 1) it is reasonable to describe Papuans as either an almost even mixture between East Asians and a lineage basal to West and East Asians occurred sometimes between 45 and 38kya, or as a sister lineage of East Asians with or without a minor basal OoA or xOoA contribution."
- qpGraphanalysis confirmed this branching pattern, with the Leang Panninge individual branching off from the Near Oceanian clade after the Denisovan gene flow, although with the most supported topology indicating around 50% of a basal East Asian component contributing to the Leang Panninge genome (Fig. 3c, Supplementary Figs. 7–11).
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- ISBN 0-521-80789-1This article says the likely aboriginal population of Australia in 1788 was around 750,000 or even over a million. There was also a chart from the Australian Bureau of Statistics – Experimental Projections of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Population, Canberra, ABS, 1998 – with estimated populations for each state and for Australia as a whole total being 418,841. Epidemics of smallpox occurred in 1789 and 1829–31. The article notes that there is evidence these epidemics traveled several hundred kilometres 'severely depopulating' tribes who had not yet had first contact with Europeans.
- ISBN 978-1-108-01785-5Dixon says "There were around 600 distinct tribes in Australia, speaking between them about 200 different languages."
- ISBN 1-875408-21-5Estimates 200 languages and over 600 dialects in 1788.
- ^ Harold Koch, p. 23, "An overview of Australian traditional languages" in Gerhard Leitner, Ian G. Malcolm (eds), The habitat of Australia's aboriginal languages: past, present and future. Says that some 250 distinct languages present in 1788.
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- ^ Jonathan Gornall (29 May 2013). "Were the African coins found in Australia from a wrecked Arab dhow?". The National. Archived from the original on 6 July 2013. Retrieved 24 June 2013.
Bibliography
- Frankel, David (2017). Between the Murray and the Sea. Aboriginal Archaeology in Southeastern Australia. ISBN 978-1-7433-2552-0.
- Blainey, Geoffrey (1976). Triumph of the Nomads: History of Ancient Australia. ISBN 978-1-349-02423-0.
- Lourandos, Harry (1997). Continent of Hunter-Gatherers: New Perspectives in Australian Prehistory. ISBN 978-0-521-35946-7.
- Thames and Hudson.
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- Isaacs, Jennifer (2006). Australian Dreaming: 40,000 Years of Aboriginal History. New Holland. ISBN 9781741102581.
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- Swain, Tony (1993). A place for strangers: towards a history of Australian Aboriginal being. ISBN 978-0-521-44691-4.
This article incorporates text by Anders Bergström et al. available under the CC BY 4.0 license.
External links
- Timeline of pre-contact Australia Australian Museum