Prehistory of Australia

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History of Australia

Prehistory

The prehistory of Australia is the period between the first human habitation of the Australian continent and the first definitive sighting of Australia by Europeans in 1606, which may be taken as the beginning of the recent history of Australia. This period is estimated to have lasted between 40,000 and 70,000 years.^[1]

This era is referred to as prehistory rather than history because there are no written records of human events in Australia which pre-date this contact.

1 Arrival
2 Culture and technology
3 Contact outside Australia
4 See also
5 References

[edit] Arrival

The minimum widely-accepted timeframe for the arrival of humans in Australia is placed at 40,000 to 45,000 years ago: the upper range supported by others is up to 70,000 years ago. Repeated episodes of extended glaciation during the Pleistocene epoch, resulted in decreases of sea levels by some 100-150 metres. Migration was achieved during the closing stages of the Pleistocene, when sea levels were much lower than they are today. The continental coastline extended much further out into the Timor Sea, and Australia and New Guinea formed a single landmass (known as Sahul), connected by an extensive land bridge across the Arafura Sea, Gulf of Carpentaria and Torres Strait. It is theorised that these ancestral peoples first navigated the shorter distances from and between the Sunda Islands to reach Sahul; then via the land bridge to spread out through the continent. Archaeological evidence indicates human habitation at the upper Swan River, Western Australia by about 40,000 years ago; Tasmania (also at that time connected via a land bridge) was reached at least 30,000 years ago.

The sharing of animal and plant species between Australia-New Guinea and nearby Indonesian islands is another consequence of the early land bridges, which closed when sea levels rose with the end of the last glacial period. The sea level stabilised to near its present levels about 6000 years ago, flooding the land bridge between Australia and New Guinea.

In the tradition of Indigenous Australians, the history of the continent begins with what is translated as the Dreamtime, the creation myth that tells of the origins of its peoples, animals and geography. Dreamtime traditions were — and continue to be — recorded in songlines and stories throughout Australia.

Archaeological evidence (in the form of charcoal) indicate that fire, already a growing part of the Australian landscape, became much more frequent as hunter-gatherers used it as a tool to drive game, to produce a green flush of new growth to attract animals, and to open up impenetrable forest. Densely grown areas became more open sclerophyll forest, open forest became grassland. Fire-tolerant species became predominant: in particular, Sheoaks, eucalypts, acacia, and grasses.

The changes to the fauna were even more dramatic: the megafauna, species significantly larger than humans, disappeared, and many of the smaller species were wiped out too. All told, about 60 different vertebrates were exterminated, including the Diprotodon family (very large marsupial herbivores that looked rather like hippos), several large flightless birds, carnivorous kangaroos, a five metre lizard and a tortoise the size of a small car. The direct cause of the mass extinctions is uncertain: it may have been fire, hunting, climate change or a combination of all, but most are of the view that it was human intervention of one kind or another increased the risks of extinction. (The once popular climate change explanation is no longer favoured. See Genyornis.) With no large herbivores to keep the understorey vegetation down and rapidly recycle soil nutrients with their dung, fuel build-up became more rapid and fires burned hotter, further changing the landscape.

The Australis, i.e. Australia and its surroundings, during the last glacial maximum about 18000 years ago (approximation). At that time, the sea level was probably about 150m or more lower than today, and most of the Sunda Shelf (Malaya/South-East Asia), the Sahul Shelf (Australia/Papua[=New Guinea]) and the Bass Strait were above it. Furthermore, parts of southern Aotearoa, the Tasmanian highlands and the Australian Alps were glaciated, and the ice of the Antarctic reached much further north than today.

It is unknown how many populations settled in Australia prior to European colonization. Both "trihybrid" and single-origin hypotheses have received extensive discussion^[2]; however, the issue has become politicized, with the assumption of a single origin tied in to ethnic solidarity, and multiple entry used to justify white seizure of Aboriginal lands. There is little objective data to settle the issue one way or the other. 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.

The period from 18,000 to 15,000 years ago saw increased aridity of the continent with lower temperatures and less rainfall than currently prevails. At the end of the Pleistocene, roughly 13,000 years ago, the Torres Strait connection, the Bassian Plain between modern-day Victoria and Tasmania, and the link from Kangaroo Island began disappearing under the rising sea. The end of the ice age was quite abrupt according to Aboriginal legends which talk of fish falling from the sky and tsunamis. Elsewhere, however, a gradual rising of the seas was recorded.

From that time on, the Tasmanian Aborigines were geographically isolated. By 9,000 years ago populations on small islands in Bass Strait, as well as Kangaroo Island, had failed to survive.

Linguistic and genetic evidence shows that there has been long-term contact between Australians in the far north and the Austronesian peoples 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.

[edit] Culture and technology

The last 5000 years were characterised by a general amelioration of the climate and an increase in temperature and rainfall and the development of a sophisticated tribal culture. The main items of trade were songs and dances, along with flint, precious stones, shells, seeds, spears, food items, etc. The Pama-Nyungan language phylum which extends from Cape York to the south west covered all of Australia except for the south east and Arnhem Land. There was also a marked continuity of religious ideas and stories throughout the country, with some songlines crossing from one side of the continent to the other. The initiation of young boys and girls into adult knowledge was marked by ceremony and feasting. 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.

Political power rested with community elders rather than hereditary chiefs and disputes were settled communally in accordance with an elaborate system of tribal law. Vendettas and feuds were not uncommon but organised warfare was limited or non-existent. This has generally been attributed to the multiple alliances that bound people together through marriage or blood, and shared belief systems about descent from common culture heroes.

There was considerable innovation occurring within Aborginal technology in the last 3000 years prior to colonisation. Quartz was used as a substitute for chert and was being worked by indigenous craftsmen. The dingo was brought from southern Asia. Small scale agricultural developments occurred with eel farming in western Victoria and yam planting e.g. in Geraldton.

It has been estimated that in 1788 there were approximately half a million Australian Aboriginal people (although other estimates have put the figure as high as 1 million or more). These populations formed hundreds of distinct cultural and language groups. Most were hunter-gatherers with rich oral histories and advanced land-management practices (a possible period of ecological destruction of the initial colonisation phase was thousands of years past). In the most fertile and populous areas, they lived in semi-permanent settlements. In the fertile Murray Basin, the gathering and hunting economies to be found elsewhere on the continent had in large part given way to fish farming.

Little interest was shown by white settlers in the bulk of the Aboriginal peoples, and so little is known of their cultures and languages. Diseases that may have been deliberately introduced decimated indigenous populations just prior to the period where most Aborigines came into direct contact with Europeans. When Lt. James Cook claimed Australia for the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1770, the native population may have consisted as many as 500 'tribes' speaking several hundred distinct Australian Aboriginal languages, with many different dialects.

[edit] Contact outside Australia

The peoples living along the northern coastline -the Kimberley, Arnhem Land, Gulf of Carpentaria and Cape York - have had encounters with various visitors for many thousands of years. People and traded goods moved freely between Australia and New Guinea up to and even after the eventual flooding of the land bridge by rising sea levels, which was completed about 6000 years ago. However, trade and intercourse between the now-separated lands continued across the newly-formed Torres Strait, whose 150 km-wide channel remained readily navigable with the chain of Torres Strait Islands and reefs affording intermediary stopping points. The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia. The traditional movement of people between Australia, New Guinea and Indonesia in sailing craft for trade and fishing indicates the possibility of Arab and Chinese traders to the northern islands learning of and then visiting the shores of the southern continent from as early as the 9th century. Early Indian visitors from around the beginning of the Common Era are also sometimes claimed to be the source of the so-called Bradshaw figurines in Kimberly art, although this is also disputed.

Indonesian "Bajini" fishermen from the Spice Islands (e.g. Banda) have fished off the coast of Australia for hundreds of years. Macassan traders from Sulawesi (formerly Celebes) regularly visited the coast of northern Australia to fish for trepang (an edible sea cucumber) to trade with the Chinese since at least the early 1700s (see the main article Macassan contact with Australia).

There was a high degree of cultural exchange, evidenced in Aboriginal rock and bark paintings, the introduction of technologies such as dug-out canoes and items such as tobacco and tobacco pipes, Macassan words in Aboriginal languages (eg. Balanda for white person), and descendants of Malay peoples in Australian Aboriginal communities and vice versa, as a result of intermarriage and migration.