On every habitable continent in the past 12000 years, mankind changed from hunter-gatherer to farmer and empire. Sometimes, they slipped back. Except in Australia: there humans never progressed beyond the hunter-gatherer stage. Is there any explanation for this? Does Australia lack a key resource necessary for early civilisation?
Ok, this is a WAG, but I imagine it was because they didn’t need to “progress” to farming. Their hunting and gathering worked just fine, and there was no reason to change it.
Oh, and by the way, this was also true for other places, such as areas in africa, and south and north america, though those continents perhaps wheren’t completely void of what todays western society might call more advanced cultures.
In any case, I’m sure someone will come along shortly who actually knows what the hell they are talking about. 
Well, Australia was fairly isolated, which meant almost no trade. New ideas more or less never came in. Much of the place is really not well-suited to cities.
Better WAG: the native florida and fauna are difficult or impossible to domesticate, or just not viable food sources. You only have civilization where you have domesticated animals and crops.
So, there are three factors, I think:
- Poor soil/weather
- Native plants not suitable for cultivation, and Aborigines didn’t bring wheat or rice with them
- Native animals not suitable for domestication, and Aborigines didn’t bring sheep or goats or pigs or cattle or chickens or whatever.
The “Guns Germs and Steel” (book) hypothesis was, I think, that the types of grains that provide high levels of protein and are therefore worth farming, were never present in Australia like they were in Europe, Asia and South America.
Based on vague memories of Guns, Germs, and Steel, I’d say environment is the biggest factor. It’s pretty damn hard to get a civilization started in the Australian desert, so that leaves wetter coastal areas. However, large animals who could have been used for farming and domestication (mostly massive forms of modern mammals) were hunted to extinction around 20,000 years ago. There probably also weren’t native plants that could be easily domesticated, like corn, wheat, or tomato. Furthermore, there weren’t nearby civilizations to trade with, learn from, or create an incentive to develop technology or risk being overrun.
I don’t think it would be genetic because what the aboriginals could do, survive in an inhospitable place with an unlucky selection of plants and animals and only basic tools, takes real skills and intelligence.
Also, I don’t think Australia was the only place that didn’t build up a civilization. I’m sure people in Africa, America, Siberia lived in a similar level of technology before European contact.
ETA: what i said mentioned by others
I am doing a doctorate which involves studying various traditional cultures and their social structures. I shall give my brief (and necessarily superficial) answer to a very big question. I am keen to read other opinions. Cites can be given on request.
Being Australian, I know the Australian traditional cultures best, but am working on the way knowledge is encoded in oral cultures all over the world. Most people study the religion and oral history, but I am looking at the science. I’m a science writer by trade. The depth of knowledge on natural history (animal behavior, plant properties and so on), astronomy, geology, weather and navigation is extraordinary - all of which has to be stored in memory, aided by a range of mnemonic devices. Our peak science research body is working with Aboriginal cultures on these topics. The overlap is far more than most people realize.
Hunter-gatherers vary hugely - the Australian Aboriginal cultures (there are a large number of them) ‘advanced’ from nomadic to mobile and semi-permanent lifestyles. You will find many studies which show that the health and nutrition of those who settled around the world, were worse after they settled. Agriculture takes a while to develop after settling. Some cultures settled and never developed agriculture. It’s not a simple progression.
Australia does not have any indigenous plants which suit agriculture. Nor do any of our native animals really suit farming. Nor were they physically close enough to any settled culture to trade domesticates. The way some Aboriginal cultures used fire is considered by some to be farming. The complex and highly efficient knowledge system of the Aboriginal cultures was extremely effective in enabling them to live very well in the variety of environments across this massive country. I guess there was no imperative to settle.
By this, do you mean that they used burns to encourage more suitable plants to grow?
Are you referring to the practice of burning sections of bush in order to cull the animals forced out?
Yes, and to promote the growth of particular plants which attracted the animals, in particular kangaroos. But I am not an expert on this - my area is formal knowledge systems - so I’d be willing to defer to higher authorities.
That’s pretty cool, when you think about it. Well, not for the kangaroos.
Australia lacks almost every key resource for the farming & domesticated animal–>population–>inventors–>technology feedback loop we call “civilization.” Paucity of useful domesticable plant species (Guns, Germs, & Steel says of the world’s top 48 grain-producing grasses, the two worst are Australian, and the two best are native to the Fertile Crescent in Mesopotamia). No native domesticable animals (dingoes were brought with the sailors who settled Australia). That’s a bigger deal than you’d think – worldwide, only 14 species of large animals have been domesticated, ever. It’s pretty rare to find useful, truly domesticable species. Australia is also very dry, but also suffers from less predictable weather than the larger landmasses. Almost no surface metal deposits, especially iron. Australia is very resource-poor for this kind of development.
Also, it’s worth noting that a LOT of the technological development we call civilization either:
-
migrated into a new area with its developers, who displaced original hunter-gatherers (as eventually did happen in Australia)
-
was adopted by neighbors (who technically didn’t originate the technology any more than did the Australian aborigines)
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inspired neighbors to develop their own version (this happened a lot with writing, for example – often, you didn’t borrow the neighbor’s language or symbols, but, after seeing how useful the concept is, intentionally developed your own script)
In light of those now-understood trends, it’s clear that there were fewer separate instances of innovation than one might think. Farmers in Britain and Siberia can trace their possession of herd animals and grains back to Mesopotamia; but the Australian aborigines settled Australia before those developments, and were subsequently out of contact and didn’t have any chance to pick up those practices – or the species that made such practices possible.
So you could say it’s both resource-poor and location-poor: hard to get to until travelers developed a technological suite that was guaranteed to overwhelm the aborigines anyway.
How did they themselves get there so early? Largely a mystery; apparently they sailed there in a voyage that could not subsequently be repeated. Possibly purely luck. That’s taking nothing away from a people who must have been epic adventurers long before most other peoples.
Without the population boom made possible by farming and domesticated animals, and thus unable to develop the concomitant disease resistance, and without the technology made possible by specialization of labor (itself made possible by surplus food production), the hunter-gatherers in Australia suffered the same fate suffered by hunter-gatherers everywhere else when coming into contact with this awesome feedback loop.
Do fish count as animals? There is good evidence for ancient fish farming near Hamilton and on the Murray River.
There is so much in these cultures which shocks me - I had no idea how complex they are/were until I started studying them. The Navajo classified over 700 insects (that’s just insects - then add in all animals) in a system with the equivalent of family, genus and species. Of those, they ate one (cicada) and knew about a dozen or so because they were botherers (knats, lice, fleas …) and all the rest were learned for knowledge’s sake. Cite: Wyman, 1964, Navaho Indian Ethnoentomology, The University of New Mexico Press. I am discovering stuff like that over and over and am astounded by it daily. I can’t manage the spiders (my favourite creatures) for the local area, even with a book! They store it all in memory. Extraordinary.
The Australian Boorong people use the story of the spirit being, Marpeankurrk, as the personification of the red giant star, Alfa Bootis, the most spectacular individual star in the sky in winter. The story tells where to find the pupae of the wood ant (termite), a staple item of diet, rich in protein. The position of the star is used to indicate the beginning and end of the availability of suitable pupae in the late winter months of August and September (Haynes, 2000, Astronomy and the Dreaming: the Astronomy of the Aboriginal Australians:64). You try surviving in the bush in late winter - none of those ubiquitous berries everyone thinks they can gather year round! And so it goes on and on. Incredible stuff!
True. I think we are going to soon find that ‘farming’ is also hard to define.
Pre-Colombian Meso-American’s had farming, domesticated animals, city-states, writing, mathematics, kings, division of labor, etc. In short, basically everything one would associate with a civilization.
African civilizations in Egypt pre-date those in Europe, so I’m not even sure what “before European contact” means in this context. Both places had the various elements of civilization imported from a common source: The Fertile Cresent in the Middle East.
Used in this context, I assume the term “Africa” is intended to refer to Sub-Saharan Africa.
EIther way, Africa picked up the trappings of civilization via the Middle East before European contact.
I didn’t mean civilization was non-existent in those areas, but that there were places in those areas with a level of development similar to 18th century Australia. Not everywhere in America was like the Mayans, and not everywhere in Africa was like the Egyptian or Mali empires. “European contact” was a poor phrase on my part, but I meant before settlers or explorers from a civilization came. This would be most common with the Europe-based Age of Exploration, I presume.
ETA: yes, it was a poor phrase, because the Middle East, Asia, etc. played roles, too.
The Kalahari Bushmen and many rain-forest natives in South America and a few other places have adapted well enough to their environment not to need to change it or themselves as well. Then there is rate of development. Northern Europe remained at a loose tribal raiding and farming stage for centuries after the South European empires had collapsed.
Their sudden cultural explosion a little less than a thousand years ago probably owes more to necessity being the mother of invention than anything else. The Gulf Stream gives the coast a milder climate than China or Canada but general forestation meant they could never accumulate the surplus food to support either large ‘scholar’ and ‘craft’ classes or non-farming slaves: almost everybody had to be a peasant with a few low-level craftsmen. The nearest thing to a scholarly class is monks, who mostly work their own lands. Shortage of slaves gave an impetus to find ‘clever’ ways to lessen the work burden.
Tribalism encouraged continental diplomacy and trade since your enemy almost certainly had an enemy of his own within relatively easy reach. Compare China, within a couple of centuries of permanent unification has invented pretty much all it ever will invent and remains static thereafter except for foreign conquerors who rapidly settle into ‘ancestral ways’. China has Japan offshore but they are mutually hostile and unified enough to resist each other. Europe has Britain, Ireland, associated islands, Iceland and then Greenland, all easy prey to raid and trade, and an encouragement to look for new islands over the horizon.
Tribalism and feudalism develop constant commerce and war between peoples well aware of each other’s differences - inclined to exaggerate them in fact. War in turn encourages invention. You don’t get this in vast settled empires. If anything you get the opposite, distrust of innovation, reverence for a lost Golden Age and constant moaning about declining standards. Most of our view of the Roman Empire as degenerate and corrupt comes from Romans themselves looking back to the Glory Days when the ‘Empire’ was central Italy.
So it could well be that North Europe’s cultural explosion arose because of cultural backwardness compared to Islam, India, Chine, even the poor old dwindling Byzantine Empire still calling itself ‘Empire of the Romans’ (in Greek). Knights were not refined educated Samurai. They were savages in tin cans swinging lumps of iron on a chain at each other. There wasn’t cultural space for Europe to settle down once it settled down from the post-Roman period.
Had there been no Europeans, somebody else would have done it but probably much slower, from a much less practical basis. (This is the theme of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Years of Rice and Salt where the Black Death exterminates Europeans and China and Islam become the leading Old World powers, and it is the Algonquin who discover Muslim Europe and bring it democracy). Europe is an edge culture where a little effort makes big difference, where people worked mainly for their own benefit and not for an owner, so that extra effort or an invention to lessen it was worth it. The ruling class was not as culturally distanced from the ruled as in the great empires - they were as pig-ignorant and loutish as the rest!