I’m a bit hazy on the “Out of Africa Theory” but how did the Aborigines get there? Did they somehow build amazing boats and just settled in Australia? It’s not exactly connected by land to anywhere…
THanks 
From Cecil’s mailbag: Where did Australian aborigines come from?
Well, Australia was probably never connected to SE asia via a land bridge during the ice age…if it was it would have experienced an exchange of species similar to what happened to South America.
But Australia was connected to New Guinea. And most of Indonesia was connected to mainland SE asia, see the map from Wallace Line - Wikipedia, most of the light blue area was dry land back in the Pleistocene.
But even though there was no direct land connection, there are plenty of islands between SE asia and Australia. And it is a pretty short boat trip between them. Wallace discovered an interesting gradient of species (especially birds). Some islands (that we now know were connected by land to SE asia) showed typically SE asia animals. Some islands (that we now know were connected by land to Australia) showed typically Australian animals. And some islands showed a mixture, the ones closer to SE asia showed more SE asian species, the ones closer to Australia showed more Australian species. See Wallacea - Wikipedia.
Humans and their domestic dogs were able to hop islands and eventually reached Australia, where most other mammals that didn’t have access to boats didn’t make it. Note that Homo erectus was present in Indonesia a million years ago (“Java Man”), but never made it to Australia despite being that same short boat ride away for a million years…meaning Homo erectus didn’t have boats. Anatomically modern humans spread out from Africa something like 100,000 years ago and had colonized Australia something like 40,000 years ago. So modern humans reached Australia in short order, while Homo erectus could not
Quantas
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That Staff report was pretty awful. The idea of Australia being connected to Asia by a land bridge is implausible for the reasons that Lemur866 already pointed out. As far as the geological evidence goes Australia was always separated from Asia by several gaps of >50km. Those sorts of spans may not seem huge, but they almost certainly meant that the landmasses were never visible to one another. As a result people needed not only boats but some ability to navigate before they could make the journey. It is doubtful if H. erectus had either.
Domestic dogs reached Australia directly. Dogs were only taken to Australia around 4, 000 years ago and by that time the people of southern Asia had ocean-going craft and were accomplished mariners. No island hopping was involved in the transfer of dogs to Australia.
But in those early days, Qantas flights didn’t have air-conditioning, so they did have to suffer marginally. Credit where credit is due.
I agree that Staff Report is pretty minimalist. (I also think it’s very old; I am not familiar with “Tech” as a member of the SDSAB.) However, I don’t think it necessarly meant that the “land bridge” extended all the way from Asia to Africa; instead the Sahul Shelf functioned as a land bridge that joined Australia to New Guinea and so cut down the amoung of water to be traversed. Admittedly the report should have been clearer about this.
Perhaps worse is the following statement, which is clearly wrong relative to present understanding of human populations:
Wow, did anyone else ever play the old coin-op Australoid back in the 80’s? Man, I haven’t thought about that in years!
All it really takes is one pregnant woman washed away by a storm, clutching a fallen tree branch and floating to a previously unknown land, and the strait has been crossed by a permanent human population.
It’s possible an island could be colonized in this way. It’s theorized that this is the way most islands get their populations of endemic rodents and reptiles.
But humans? Probably not. That woman would have to be pregnant with a boy, right? And she’d have to wait, what, ~14 years before she could mate with her son and get pregnant again. It doesn’t seem like a very promising start, even discounting inbreeding. Humans are social animals, we need to live in a community.
And consider what I wrote earlier. There were *Homo erectus * living on the other side of the straits for a million years. None of them managed to colonize Australia, or if they did the colony died out relatively quickly. If Australia could be populated by pregnant humans clutching logs, why didn’t that happen with the longstanding populations of Homo erectus? Then anatomically modern humans evolve and Australia is colonized in short order, perhaps sooner than Europe. So the clear evidence is that Australia was colonized on purpose. Groups of people got in boats and sailed over to that island over there, then groups of people on that island sailed over to the next island, and the next, and the next “island” they colonized, perhaps generations later, was Australia.
And Australia wasn’t isolated. Although it wasn’t “discovered” by Europeans until the 1600s we have archeological evidence that Australians traded with Indonesians more or less continuously. Just like Eskimos on either side of the Bering Strait traded with each other.
Fair enough interpretation, but it raises several other problems.
Firstly it implies that the Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia was a significant barrier to colonising Australia. In actual fact even today a person is never out of sight of land in the Torres Strait and a strong swimmer could make the journey between the two landmasses without a boat (if she was lucky). The real barrier was always the Timor Sea and the Straits of Moluccas which separate the landmasses from Indonesia. Since those areas always remained separated by water and had strong currents they posed real problems.
The interpretation also implies that Australia was colonised from New Guinea. It is at least as plausible that New Guinea was colonised from Australia since the Timor Sea barrier was only a few kilometres wider than the Moluccas Straits at that time, and the currents made it far eaiser to navigate.
A further problem is that the report speaks of the peopling of “Australia and Tasmania” when referring to a Torres land bridge making sea travel less essentail, but fails to note the more important land bridge between the mainland and Tasmania.
I agree. In fact I’d go further and say that it was wrong in every respect even at the time it was written.
It talks about Aborigines being “gentically” Australoid, but to the best of my knowledge there has never been a genetic standard for Australoid. As such the claim would have actually been less accurate when written than it is today. Aborigines were never gentically classified as Australoid; that classification was made on morphological or linguistic grounds.
It also says that Aborigines are “a mixing of Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid stock”. The only time I have sent his suggestion put forth is in 19th century writings. It’s hard to imagine it appearing in any material recent enough for inclusion in a Staff Report.
And then it goes on to state that it’s hard to say who the closest relatives of Aborigines are. My strong impression is that it has always been accepted that the closest relatives of Aborigines are Australoid New Guineans and Torres Strait Islanders. That assumption goes back to the 19th century at least, and is still accepted today. I have never seen anyone ever suggest otherwise. It is so obvious based on morphological, linguistic and simple geographic evidence and has since been borne out by genetic evidence.
Not the best staff report ever.
Agreed. I think at the time it was written standards for Staff Reports were considerably lower than they are now. It should probably be retired or revised
Have there not been any DNA studies?
There have been quite a few, but the results don’t tell us much.
Genetically Aborigines are most closely related to People form the Torres Strait Islands and some people from New Guinea. But as I noted above, that didn’t surprise anyone. Australia, New Guinea and the Torres Strait were the single landmass of Meganesia until a few thousand years ago. Even today these groups live side by side, they look similar physically and there is even some linguistic overlap. Of course they are related. However that tells us absolutely nothing about the origins of Aborigines. All it tells us is that Aborigines are related to other Meganesians. It doesn’t even tell us whether NG was colonised by Aborigines, or whether Aborigines are originally of New Guinean descent.
Looking for genetic relatives of Aborigines outside Meganesia has proved futile. Certainly the Mongoloid population of New Guinea are genetically close to Mongoloid populations the Indonesian Archipeligo, but they aren’t close to Aborigines or Australoid New Guineans. In contrast there is some weak evidence of genetic relationships between Aborigines and people in India and Sri Lanka and various scattered groups through Indonesia
What appears to have happened is that Australoid people similar to Aborigines once occupied the whole of Southern Asia, from Southern India all the way through Indo-China across Indonesia and the Phillipines. From Indonesia they then colonised Meganesia. The after the development of agriculture they were largely displaced or assimilated by much larger populations of unrelated agricultural peoples. In India Australoids have been largely absorbed by Causcasians from the North. In South East Asia by Mongoloids from China.
As a result today the vast majority of Eastern Asia has been occupied by Mongoloid people leaving the Meganesian Australoids geographically isolated from their nearest relatives. Whatever relatives may exist have been genetically swamped through constant interbreeding with more numerous Mongolid and Caucasoid people making genetic evaluation of modern groups all but impossible.
The best hope we have of sorting out the origins of Aborigines is by genetic tests on remains >10, 000 years old. That might allow a reconstruction of the population as it was before the great replacement of the Australoids.
One relictual group that may be related to the early colonizers of Australia and New Guinea is the Andaman Islanders.
Caution: pdf
Wherever they came from, did they bring along cows and quaff milk of Meganesia along the way?
::d&r::