From your link:
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Lombok Strait is 300m deep and roughly 35 km wide and the currents vary between 0.286 m/s (0.6 mi/hr) eastward to 0.67 m/s westward and average 0.25 m/s westward.
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The currents are often strong, but not always in the same direction. So there are slack times at which a raft might well be carried across by winds.
Before you get too carried you really need to understand that Lombok Strait is simply not a barrier. It’s not a barrier to modern humans. It’s not a barrier to pre-human hominids. It isn’t even a barrier to large mammals generally. The Lombok Straits mark the edge of the *Wallace *Line, not the Russell Line. It’s the boundary for expansion of Megansesian species northward. It isn’t the boundary for Asian species southward. The main reason it’s a boundary at all is that the series of small islands leading to Bali make it difficult for the small Australian fauna to disperse. It’s not a barrier for large mammals and never has been. Palaeolithic people crossed Lombok Strait numerous times. Homo erectus crossed Lomobok Striat and colonised Timor. Shit, animals such as tigers and elephants crossed Lombok Strait.
Sure, it’s got some currents at times, but most of the time it’s about as still as the English Channel. You are trying to portray it as some sort of impassable barrier, and that crossing it requires advanced sailing technology. The simple fact is that animals such as tigers have swum the straits multiple times. H. erectus, who we know had no advanced sailing technology, manage to cross the strait. That fact that modern humans crossed the straits is not evidence of sailing technology. It isn’t even evidence of anything beyond an ability to swim. It’s an achievement that many other large mammals species have managed, not a great feat of technology. The idea that you can’t paddle across the straits is quite easily disproved by the fact that animals such as tigers did exactly that, as did pre-human hominids.
The real barrier to colonisation of Australia were the straits between Ceram and New Guinea or Timor and the mainland. Those are the barrier that no Asian mammal species crossed, including hominids, until the arrival of fully modern humans. modern humans. In contrast we know that great many mammal species paddled across the Lombok Straits
The Ceram straits are notoriously for their currents, though very narrow. The Timor Straits are much smoother, though wider, being about 100 km at the time of human colonisation of Australia. Which route humans took into Australia is unknown, though the TImor route was probably used precisely because it didn’t require advanced sailing technology. Because of the width of the gap and the relatively gentle currents, all that was required to make the crossing was diligence. The presence of a large landmass on the other side would also have been obvious to anybody with a basic ability to read weather or bird migration patterns, so it’s not like the crossing was an act of pure faith. The orientation of Timor also means that it ran parallel to the Australian coastline for several hundred kilometres at a constant distance. This would not only have made the initial crossing easier, but also made a return journey relatively simple suing just basic rafts or canoes. So long as the traveler could maintain an approximately northward travel, he couldn’t easily get swept out to sea.
So while the first Australians may have been dogged and brave, there’s no evidence of advanced sailing techniques.
This is what made me curious about the currents. If advanced sailing techniques were in use it doesn’t seem likely they would disappear. But once people had settled in, spread away from the landing points, and become comfortable and self-sufficient, travel across a perilous strait could seem impracticle and unnecessary, and I could see the knowledge being lost, maybe without being missed.
I’m assuming advanced sailing techniques would have led to an enduring fishing culture along the coast of Australia that would have maintained and advanced the technology. And of course they would have stayed in contact with lands to the north. If the sailing techniques had been developed simply for transporatation instead of fishing, it seems even less likely they would have disappeared.
Watercraft technology in Australia was pretty primitive by world standards. There was no sailing as such, since Australians never invented the sail. The most advanced craft on the continent were dugout canoes fashioned from a single log, but these were only found in the North, and almost certainly were the result of technology borrowed from other cultures, an assumption backed up by cave paintings. in the 19th century Aborigines made copies of outrigger canoes used by South Sea islander labourers, but this was indisputably adoption of alien technology.
The best of the indigenous Australian watercraft were canoes made of a large sheet of tree bark tied at the ends. The most common watercraft was a “raft” made of reeds of small sticks tied into a bundle. I say “raft” because it was basically just a floating platform that person could stand on while fishing, and by all accounts was often below the waterline while in use. These were definitely not ocean going craft.
The bark canoe was widespread enough across the continent that it’s a safe bet that it was an ancestral technology that was retained over time. They were by no means meant to be ocean going craft, since they lacked permanent fastening such as rivets or even stitching and were easily demolished by flexing. they did have one great advantage that, if the correct bark is used, the material itself retains bouyancy and can by used a a functional raft even if the ties come undone. It wouldn’t be something to do on a whim, but it wouldn’t be any great feat to paddle one across a hundred mile span of ocean on a clam day. Given that you have several hundred miles of coastline waiting for you on the other side and the craft is litrally unsinkable, it certainly wouldn’t need advanced sailing techniques. Essentially all you’d need to do for the Timor crossing is the keep moving approximately southward. It would take a better man than me to actually *do *it, but not a superman and not someone with any sailing ability beyond the ability to find south and the fitness to use the paddle for hours, possibly days, on end.
So the people who did this probably did remain in semi-regular contact with the lands to the north, at least until sea level rises made further crossing impossible, We have a fair idea that this happened simply because of the huge genetic diversity of the Australian Aborigines. Unlike the American Indians, who show clear signs of a founder effects and genetic bottleneck from their colonisation, the Australian Aborigines were extremely diverse. Some of the older Aboriginal skeletons actually fall outside the genetic range of modern humanity, so by that standard the original colonists were actually more diverse than the human race of today. There’s simply no way that such as diversity could be the result of a single isolated colonisation event from a single extended family as was the case in the Americas The colonisation must have been either occurring all along the coast of southern Indonesia or, more likely, there was a genetic interchange of many hundreds or thousands of years.
As for the fishing culture, fish was an important food source. However we know that Aborigines rarely if even visited islands unpopulated islands more than about 15 km off the coast. We can also estmate when Tasmania became isolated by sea level rise, and it was when the islands were less than 50 km apart. So the Aborigines weren’t great mariners. Once again, this is easily explainable by the nature of their watercraft. If an island couldn’t sustain a human population, then the risk of traveling to it was too great to make it worthwhile. It’s not that the sailing technology was lost over time, it just wasn’t that great to start with.
The map linked earlier shows the coastline at its lowest, and suggest New Guinea was attached to Australia (as was Tasmania).
Crossing a straight that’s about 50 miles across, with hundreds of miles of coasline on the otherside (back then) is less of a technical accomplishment than finding small islands hundreds of miles apart. However, that’s why it took about 40,000 years longer.
There’s a difference between a technology that creates a relatively useful fishing platform raft, and a vessel that will take a decent colonial group across 50 miles of open ocean, especially if the other side is not visible over the horizon.
One can imagine the odd fisherman getting blown across, but to get back with the news - unless the person is very very lucky, their return trip will plunk them a hundred miles or more away from their village. Unless they were habitual coastal sailors with good canoes or equivalent who often travelled up the coasts, what are the odds they would recognize where they were and how to find home? Some guy floating on a reed raft would not travelmore than a mile back and forth, I assume. The construction of aquadynamic(?) pointy, seaworthy craft, paddles, etc. takes travel to a whole different level of technology.
I remember reading an article once that discussed skin colour around the equator, which suggested that in fact the extrmely dark skin found from Africa across lower India and Australia was not so much a reaction to the sun, as also a reaction to a seafaring culture back in the 40,000BC era all the way from Indonesia to the west coast of Africa. UV exposure reflected off the water increased exposure and so the high-melanin adaption. Not sure if this was wild speculation or has some acceptance as a theory.
Yes, the development of the aborigines is prety pathetic - 40,000 years and all they left was some graffitti. However, as Jared Diamond does point out in his 2 books - the development of civilizations, and the luxury of surplus labour to produce decent construction, is a side-effect of agriculture; he also points out that agriculture relied on fortuitous discovery of just the right plants. Those were not found in the right habitats in Australia. The Iroquois of New York, for example, would not have had their big longhouse and pallisade settlements without corn (ditto the central US mound-builders), which was developed by the pre-Aztec civilizations in more compatible climates and fortunately, also grew in harsh temperate zones. Wheat agriculture never spread tosouth Africa because the intermediate areas did not have the right seasons for wheat. The spread of polynesians became less productive as they moved beyond the climate zones of what they started with, and they lost some crops and animals. The aborigines just picked the wrong place…
Any speculation on the distance between “Africa” and “South America” when those monkeys supposedly rafted over after their separation? (Now there’s some primitive technology!)
As I already pointed out, the Ceram Straits between New Guinea and Indonesia are one possible entry point. They were narrow but the also had some fierce currents, making the initial trip dangerous and any return trip effectively impossible. That’s one of the main reasons I favour the Timor entry point. Wider gap, but much calmer water and a much bigger target on both sides.
Pretty damn good.
To put this into perspective, Aborigines in Australia were regularly travelling 600 kilometres along the coastline for important festivals, and the San in Southern Africa were travelling at least 300. While the home range of HGs was relatively small, any individual would have been at least passingly familiar with wide areas around her home. HGs were usually in a state of open war with at least some of their immediate neighbours, but groups form further afeild were usually much less hostile, so any returning explorer could simply ask how to get home. They wouldn’t need to actually *recognise *the territory.
As I already pointed out, there’s good reason to believe that boat technology had already long surpassed the reed raft stage when Australia was colonised.
It is certainly one theory. A slightly different version is that Black skin evolved in Indo-Malaya and swept back into Africa. Certain the oldest human groups, such as the San, do not appear to have Black skin, and white skin is just a subset of Black skin. so either Black/White skin evolved >65, 000 years ago and somehow never spread into the South of Africa, or it evolved twice, or it evolved outside of Africa.
:eek:
How astonishly racist.
And as I have pointed out on multiple occasions, this claim of Damond’s is patently a load of horseshit. Australia is home to rice bananas, olives, taro, sunflowers, terminalias, grapes, macadamias, sorghum, teff and many, many other plants that were widely domesticated elsewhere. Shit, agriculture was invented, possibly originally invented, just offshore in New Guinea in a locale with an almost exclusively Australian suite of plants. Even in his book Diamond has to cherry pick his examples to try to make this claim in Australia, by just looking at grasses and just those occurring in the geographicaly isolated SW Australia. He tries to justify this by claiming that agriculture can only develop in Mediterranean climates. This ignores the fact that agriculture was independently invented in South America and New Guinea, and probably in China, Southern Africa and Central America, in environments that are distinctly non-Mediterranean. Diamond has to restrict his “search” to SW Australia, because cursory examination of the rest of Australia will reveal the hundreds, if not thousands, of highly suitable domesticates. The rice and bananas in Australia are the same freakin’ species that formed the basis of the first agricuture in Asia and New Guinea.
Claiming that Australia lacks domesticable plants if special pleading of the highest order and relies on an unsustainable assumption that only Mediterranean plants are domesticable.
I appreciate your use of pronouns. Thanks! 
Why would they? It would be a 3,000 mile journey across open ocean, and there’s a good chance they wouldn’t encounter a single rest point along the way. But even more than that, they wouldn’t have any idea whether there was actually land across there, how far it was, which direction it was or whether it was inhabitable. The sea might go on forever or you might fall off the edge of the world, and since they already lived on an enormous land mass there’d be no reason to check it out other than curiosity.
Not saying they did, but that’s not really a good reason since we know the Polynesians pretty much did just that.
Africans did manage to make it to the Canary Islands at some point, but there is a long way to go before you reach S. America. And nobody managed to make it to the Azores until relatively modern times. I doubt any culture that hadn’t developed somewhat advanced seafaring ability (sailing is an inadequate term I was using previously) would attempt an ocean crossing to an unknown destination, or survive such a voyage if swept out to sea. Columbus had state of the art boats and experienced crews, and still needed pure dumb luck to have survived.
Here’s one explanationas to how the Polynesians did it - essentially naked eye astronomical observations, allied with close attention to sea conditions and indications of land over the horizon. Once you can sail back home with confidence what’s to stop you exploring off to find new lands?
But they did it in steps, building their voyaging skills over time with hops from island to island, before setting out thousand-mile trips.