Prehistory of Australia
Encyclopedia
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 60,000 years.
This era is referred to as prehistory
rather than history
because there are no paper written records of human events in Australia which pre-date this contact.
The minimum widely-accepted timeframe for the arrival of humans in Australia is placed at least 40,000 years ago. Many sites dating from this time period have been excavated.
Archaeological evidence indicates human habitation at the upper Swan River, Western Australia
by about 40,000 years ago; Tasmania
(at that time connected via a land bridge) was reached at least 30,000 years ago. Others have claimed that some sites date back up to 60,000 years, but these claims are not universally accepted.
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.
Charles Dortch has identified Aboriginal stone tools, found at Rottnest, as dating possibly to 70,000 years, making them amongst the first evidence of modern Homo sapiens found outside Africa. This seems to tie in accurately with U/Th
and 14C results of a flint tool found embedded in Tamala limestone (Aminozone C) as well as both mtDNA and Y chromosome studies on the genetic distance of Australian Aboriginal genomes from African and other Eurasian ones.
Migration was achieved during the closing stages of the Pleistocene
, when sea level
s were much lower than they are today. Repeated episodes of extended glaciation
during the Pleistocene epoch
, resulted in decreases of sea levels by more than 100 metres in Australasia.
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
. Nevertheless, the sea still presented a major obstacle so it is theorised that these ancestral people reached Australia by island hopping. Two routes have been proposed. One follows an island chain between Sulawesi
and New Guinea and the other reaches North Western Australia via Timor
.
The sharing of animal and plant species between Australia-New Guinea and nearby Indonesia
n 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.
It is unknown how many populations settled in Australia prior to European colonisation. Both "trihybrid" and single-origin hypotheses have received extensive discussion; however, the issue has become politicised, 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. Some Y chromosomal studies indicate a recent influx of Y chromosomes from the Indian subcontinent.
forest, open forest became grassland. Fire-tolerant species became predominant: in particular, eucalyptus
, 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 became extinct, including the Diprotodon
family (very large marsupial herbivores that looked rather like hippos), several large flightless birds, carnivorous kangaroos, a five metre lizard and Meiolania
, 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 or any of these factors. (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 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.
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 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.
. 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.
Describing prehistoric Aboriginal culture and society during her 1999 Boyer Lecture
, Australian historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen
explained:
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. 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 .
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.
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 a 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. Sturt's expedition along the Murray led to a belief that the Aboriginal groups there were practicing agriculture as a result of the presence of large hay-stacks, used as permanent grain stores.
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 just prior to the period where most Aborigines came into direct contact with Europeans. When Cook
first claimed New South Wales
for Britain in 1770, the native population may have consisted of as many as 600 distinct tribes speaking 200-250 distinct languages
and over 600 distinct dialects and sub-dialects.
, 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.
Indonesian "Bajau
" 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 18th century (see the main article Macassan contact with Australia
). Some historians believe that Tamil
sea-farers might have had knowledge of Australia and Polynesia
much before European contact.
The myths of the people of Arnhem Land
have preserved account of trepang-catching, rice-growing Baijini
people, who, according to the myths, were in Australia in the earliest times, before the Macassans. The Baijini have been variously interpreted by modern researchers as a different group of (presumably, SE Asian, such as Bajau
) visitors to Australia who may have visited Arnhem Land before the Macassans,
as a mythological reflection of the experiences of some Yolŋu people who have travelled to Sulawesi
with the Macassans and came back, or, in more fringe views, even as visitors from China.
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 (e.g. Balanda for white person), and descendants of Malay
people in Australian Aboriginal communities and vice versa, as a result of intermarriage and migration.
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
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 60,000 years.
This era is referred to as prehistory
Prehistory
Prehistory is the span of time before recorded history. Prehistory can refer to the period of human existence before the availability of those written records with which recorded history begins. More broadly, it refers to all the time preceding human existence and the invention of writing...
rather than history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
because there are no paper written records of human events in Australia which pre-date this contact.
Arrival
- See also Early human migrations#South Asia and Australia
Archaeological evidence indicates human habitation at the upper Swan River, Western Australia
Swan River (Western Australia)
The Swan River estuary flows through the city of Perth, in the south west of Western Australia. Its lower reaches are relatively wide and deep, with few constrictions, while the upper reaches are usually quite narrow and shallow....
by about 40,000 years ago; Tasmania
Tasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
(at that time connected via a land bridge) was reached at least 30,000 years ago. Others have claimed that some sites date back up to 60,000 years, but these claims are not universally accepted.
Palynological
Palynology
Palynology is the science that studies contemporary and fossil palynomorphs, including pollen, spores, orbicules, dinoflagellate cysts, acritarchs, chitinozoans and scolecodonts, together with particulate organic matter and kerogen found in sedimentary rocks and sediments...
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.
Charles Dortch has identified Aboriginal stone tools, found at Rottnest, as dating possibly to 70,000 years, making them amongst the first evidence of modern Homo sapiens found outside Africa. This seems to tie in accurately with U/Th
Uranium-thorium dating
Uranium-thorium dating, also called thorium-230 dating, uranium-series disequilibrium dating or uranium-series dating, is a radiometric dating technique commonly used to determine the age of calcium carbonate materials such as speleothem or coral...
and 14C results of a flint tool found embedded in Tamala limestone (Aminozone C) as well as both mtDNA and Y chromosome studies on the genetic distance of Australian Aboriginal genomes from African and other Eurasian ones.
Migration was achieved during the closing stages of the Pleistocene
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....
, when sea level
Sea level
Mean sea level is a measure of the average height of the ocean's surface ; used as a standard in reckoning land elevation...
s were much lower than they are today. Repeated episodes of extended glaciation
Glacier
A glacier is a large persistent body of ice that forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds its ablation over many years, often centuries. At least 0.1 km² in area and 50 m thick, but often much larger, a glacier slowly deforms and flows due to stresses induced by its weight...
during the Pleistocene epoch
Epoch (geology)
An epoch is a subdivision of the geologic timescale based on rock layering. In order, the higher subdivisions are periods, eras and eons. We are currently living in the Holocene epoch...
, resulted in decreases of sea levels by more than 100 metres in Australasia.
The continental coastline extended much further out into the Timor Sea
Timor Sea
The Timor Sea is a relatively shallow sea bounded to the north by the island of Timor, to the east by the Arafura Sea, to the south by Australia and to the west by the Indian Ocean....
, and Australia and New Guinea
New Guinea
New Guinea is the world's second largest island, after Greenland, covering a land area of 786,000 km2. Located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, it lies geographically to the east of the Malay Archipelago, with which it is sometimes included as part of a greater Indo-Australian Archipelago...
formed a single landmass (known as Sahul
Australia (continent)
Australia is the world's smallest continent, comprising the mainland of Australia and proximate islands including Tasmania, New Guinea, the Aru Islands and Raja Ampat Islands...
), connected by an extensive land bridge
Land bridge
A land bridge, in biogeography, is an isthmus or wider land connection between otherwise separate areas, over which animals and plants are able to cross and colonise new lands...
across the Arafura Sea
Arafura Sea
The Arafura Sea lies west of the Pacific Ocean overlying the continental shelf between Australia and New Guinea.-Geography:The Arafura Sea is bordered by Torres Strait and through that the Coral Sea to the east, the Gulf of Carpentaria to the south, the Timor Sea to the west and the Banda and Ceram...
, Gulf of Carpentaria
Gulf of Carpentaria
The Gulf of Carpentaria is a large, shallow sea enclosed on three sides by northern Australia and bounded on the north by the Arafura Sea...
and Torres Strait
Torres Strait
The Torres Strait is a body of water which lies between Australia and the Melanesian island of New Guinea. It is approximately wide at its narrowest extent. To the south is Cape York Peninsula, the northernmost continental extremity of the Australian state of Queensland...
. Nevertheless, the sea still presented a major obstacle so it is theorised that these ancestral people reached Australia by island hopping. Two routes have been proposed. One follows an island chain between Sulawesi
Sulawesi
Sulawesi is one of the four larger Sunda Islands of Indonesia and is situated between Borneo and the Maluku Islands. In Indonesia, only Sumatra, Borneo, and Papua are larger in territory, and only Java and Sumatra have larger Indonesian populations.- Etymology :The Portuguese were the first to...
and New Guinea and the other reaches North Western Australia via Timor
Timor
Timor is an island at the southern end of Maritime Southeast Asia, north of the Timor Sea. It is divided between the independent state of East Timor, and West Timor, belonging to the Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggara. The island's surface is 30,777 square kilometres...
.
The sharing of animal and plant species between Australia-New Guinea and nearby Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...
n 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
4th millennium BC
The 4th millennium BC saw major changes in human culture. It marked the beginning of the Bronze Age and of writing.The city states of Sumer and the kingdom of Egypt were established and grew to prominence. Agriculture spread widely across Eurasia...
, flooding the land bridge between Australia and New Guinea.
It is unknown how many populations settled in Australia prior to European colonisation. Both "trihybrid" and single-origin hypotheses have received extensive discussion; however, the issue has become politicised, 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
Human Genome Diversity Project
The Human Genome Diversity Project was started by Stanford University's Morrison Institute and a collaboration of scientists around the world. It is the result of many years of work by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, one of the most cited scientists in the world, which has published extensively in the use...
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. Some Y chromosomal studies indicate a recent influx of Y chromosomes from the Indian subcontinent.
Advent of fire farming and megafauna extinctions
Archaeological evidence (in the form of charcoal) indicates 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 sclerophyllSclerophyll
Sclerophyll is the term for a type of vegetation that has hard leaves and short internodes . The word comes from the Greek sclero and phyllon ....
forest, open forest became grassland. Fire-tolerant species became predominant: in particular, eucalyptus
Eucalyptus
Eucalyptus is a diverse genus of flowering trees in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae. Members of the genus dominate the tree flora of Australia...
, acacia
Acacia
Acacia is a genus of shrubs and trees belonging to the subfamily Mimosoideae of the family Fabaceae, first described in Africa by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in 1773. Many non-Australian species tend to be thorny, whereas the majority of Australian acacias are not...
, and grasses.
Megafauna
In terrestrial zoology, megafauna are "giant", "very large" or "large" animals. The most common thresholds used are or...
, species significantly larger than humans, disappeared, and many of the smaller species were wiped out too. All told, about 60 different vertebrates became extinct, including the Diprotodon
Diprotodon
Diprotodon, meaning "two forward teeth", sometimes known as the Giant Wombat or the Rhinoceros Wombat, was the largest known marsupial that ever lived...
family (very large marsupial herbivores that looked rather like hippos), several large flightless birds, carnivorous kangaroos, a five metre lizard and Meiolania
Meiolania
Meiolania is an extinct genus of cryptodire turtle from the Oligocene to Holocene, with the last relict populations at New Caledonia which survived until 2,000 years ago....
, 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 or any of these factors. (The once popular climate change
Climate change
Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions or the distribution of events around that average...
explanation is no longer favoured. See Genyornis
Genyornis
Genyornis was a monotypic genus of large, flightless bird that lived in Australia until 50±5 thousand years ago. Many species became extinct in Australia around that time, coinciding with the arrival of humans....
.) 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 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
Torres Strait
The Torres Strait is a body of water which lies between Australia and the Melanesian island of New Guinea. It is approximately wide at its narrowest extent. To the south is Cape York Peninsula, the northernmost continental extremity of the Australian state of Queensland...
connection, the Bassian Plain between modern-day Victoria
Victoria (Australia)
Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....
and Tasmania
Tasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
, and the link from Kangaroo Island
Kangaroo Island
Kangaroo Island is Australia's third-largest island after Tasmania and Melville Island. It is southwest of Adelaide at the entrance of Gulf St Vincent. Its closest point to the mainland is off Cape Jervis, on the tip of the Fleurieu Peninsula in the state of South Australia. The island is long...
began disappearing under the rising sea.
From that time on, the Tasmanian Aborigines
Tasmanian Aborigines
The Tasmanian Aborigines were the indigenous people of the island state of Tasmania, Australia. Before British colonisation in 1803, there were an estimated 3,000–15,000 Parlevar. A number of historians point to introduced disease as the major cause of the destruction of the full-blooded...
were geographically isolated. By 9,000 years ago populations on small islands in Bass Strait
Bass Strait
Bass Strait is a sea strait separating Tasmania from the south of the Australian mainland, specifically the state of Victoria.-Extent:The International Hydrographic Organization defines the limits of the Bass Strait as follows:...
, as well as Kangaroo Island
Kangaroo Island
Kangaroo Island is Australia's third-largest island after Tasmania and Melville Island. It is southwest of Adelaide at the entrance of Gulf St Vincent. Its closest point to the mainland is off Cape Jervis, on the tip of the Fleurieu Peninsula in the state of South Australia. The island is long...
, 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 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
Makassar
Makassar, is the provincial capital of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, and the largest city on Sulawesi Island. From 1971 to 1999, the city was named Ujung Pandang, after a precolonial fort in the city, and the two names are often used interchangeably...
praus
Proa
A proa, also seen as prau, perahu, and prahu, is a type of multihull sailing vessel.While the word perahu and proa are generic terms meaning boat their native language, proa in Western languages has come to describe a vessel consisting of two unequal length parallel hulls...
are also recorded in the Aboriginal stories from Broome
Broome, Western Australia
Broome is a pearling and tourist town in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, north of Perth. The year round population is approximately 14,436, growing to more than 45,000 per month during the tourist season...
to the Gulf of Carpentaria
Gulf of Carpentaria
The Gulf of Carpentaria is a large, shallow sea enclosed on three sides by northern Australia and bounded on the north by the Arafura Sea...
, and there were some semi-permanent settlements established, and cases of Aboriginal settlers finding a home in Indonesia.
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 social structureTribe
A tribe, viewed historically or developmentally, consists of a social group existing before the development of, or outside of, states.Many anthropologists use the term tribal society to refer to societies organized largely on the basis of kinship, especially corporate descent groups .Some theorists...
. The main items of trade were songs and dances, along with flint
Flint
Flint is a hard, sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as a variety of chert. It occurs chiefly as nodules and masses in sedimentary rocks, such as chalks and limestones. Inside the nodule, flint is usually dark grey, black, green, white, or brown in colour, and...
, precious stones, shells, seeds, spears, food items, etc.
The Pama–Nyungan language phylum which extends from Cape York
Cape York Peninsula
Cape York Peninsula is a large remote peninsula located in Far North Queensland at the tip of the state of Queensland, Australia, the largest unspoilt wilderness in northern Australia and one of the last remaining wilderness areas on Earth...
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
Songlines
Songlines, also called Dreaming tracks by Indigenous Australians within the animist indigenous belief system, are paths across the land which mark the route followed by localised 'creator-beings' during the Dreaming...
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
Australian Aboriginal kinship
Australian Aboriginal kinship is the system of law governing social interaction, particularly marriage, in traditional Australian Aboriginal culture...
observed by many communities included a division into moieties, with restrictions on intermarrying dictated by the moiety an individual belonged to.
Describing prehistoric Aboriginal culture and society during her 1999 Boyer Lecture
Boyer Lectures
The Boyer Lectures began in 1959 as the ABC Lectures. They were renamed in 1961 after Richard Boyer , the ABC board chairman who had first suggested the lectures...
, Australian historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen
Inga Clendinnen
Inga Vivienne Clendinnen AO is an Australian author and historian, anthropologist and academic.-Life and career:Born in Geelong, Victoria, Clendinnen graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1955 with a BA...
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 atlasAtlasAn atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a map of Earth or a region of Earth, but there are atlases of the other planets in the Solar System. Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats...
es, and walking encyclopedias of natural historyNatural historyNatural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...
. [...] Detailed observations of natureNatureNature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
were elevated into dramaDramaDrama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...
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 with moralMoralityMorality is the differentiation among intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good and bad . A moral code is a system of morality and a moral is any one practice or teaching within a moral code...
significance but with pathos, and with humour, too - after all, the DreamtimeDreamtimeIn the animist framework of Australian Aboriginal mythology, The Dreaming is a sacred era in which ancestral Totemic Spirit Beings formed The Creation.-The Dreaming of the Aboriginal times:...
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."
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. 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 .
Cremation of the dead was practised by 25,000 years ago, possibly before anywhere else on Earth, and early artwork in Koonalda Cave
Koonalda Cave
Koonalda Cave is an important archeological site in Nullarbor Plain, in South Australia.Thousands of square metres in the cave are covered in parallel finger-marked geometric lines and patterns, Indigenous Australian artwork which has been dated as 20,000 years old , making it older than any known...
, Nullarbor Plain
Nullarbor Plain
The Nullarbor Plain is part of the area of flat, almost treeless, arid or semi-arid country of southern Australia, located on the Great Australian Bight coast with the Great Victoria Desert to its north. It is the world's largest single piece of limestone, and occupies an area of about...
, has been dated back to 20,000 years ago.
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 a 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
Murray River
The Murray River is Australia's longest river. At in length, the Murray rises in the Australian Alps, draining the western side of Australia's highest mountains and, for most of its length, meanders across Australia's inland plains, forming the border between New South Wales and Victoria as it...
, the gathering and hunting economies to be found elsewhere on the continent had in large part given way to fish farming. Sturt's expedition along the Murray led to a belief that the Aboriginal groups there were practicing agriculture as a result of the presence of large hay-stacks, used as permanent grain stores.
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 just prior to the period where most Aborigines came into direct contact with Europeans. When Cook
James Cook
Captain James Cook, FRS, RN was a British explorer, navigator and cartographer who ultimately rose to the rank of captain in the Royal Navy...
first claimed New South Wales
New South Wales
New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...
for Britain in 1770, the native population may have consisted of as many as 600 distinct tribes speaking 200-250 distinct languages
Australian Aboriginal languages
The Australian Aboriginal languages comprise several language families and isolates native to the Australian Aborigines of Australia and a few nearby islands, but by convention excluding the languages of Tasmania and the Torres Strait Islanders...
and over 600 distinct dialects and sub-dialects.
Contact outside Australia
The people living along the northern coastline -the KimberleyKimberley region of Western Australia
The Kimberley is one of the nine regions of Western Australia. It is located in the northern part of Western Australia, bordered on the west by the Indian Ocean, on the north by the Timor Sea, on the south by the Great Sandy and Tanami Deserts, and on the east by the Northern Territory.The region...
, Arnhem Land
Arnhem Land
The Arnhem Land Region is one of the five regions of the Northern Territory of Australia. It is located in the north-eastern corner of the territory and is around 500 km from the territory capital Darwin. The region has an area of 97,000 km² which also covers the area of Kakadu National...
, Gulf of Carpentaria
Gulf of Carpentaria
The Gulf of Carpentaria is a large, shallow sea enclosed on three sides by northern Australia and bounded on the north by the Arafura Sea...
and Cape York
Cape York Peninsula
Cape York Peninsula is a large remote peninsula located in Far North Queensland at the tip of the state of Queensland, Australia, the largest unspoilt wilderness in northern Australia and one of the last remaining wilderness areas on Earth...
- 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
Land bridge
A land bridge, in biogeography, is an isthmus or wider land connection between otherwise separate areas, over which animals and plants are able to cross and colonise new lands...
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
Torres Strait
The Torres Strait is a body of water which lies between Australia and the Melanesian island of New Guinea. It is approximately wide at its narrowest extent. To the south is Cape York Peninsula, the northernmost continental extremity of the Australian state of Queensland...
, whose 150 km-wide channel remained readily navigable with the chain of Torres Strait Islands
Torres Strait Islands
The Torres Strait Islands are a group of at least 274 small islands which lie in Torres Strait, the waterway separating far northern continental Australia's Cape York Peninsula and the island of New Guinea but Torres Strait Island known and Recognize as Nyumaria.The islands are mostly part of...
and reefs affording intermediary stopping points. The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders
Torres Strait Islanders
Torres Strait Islanders are the indigenous people of the Torres Strait Islands, part of Queensland, Australia. They are culturally and genetically linked to Melanesian peoples and those of Papua New Guinea....
over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
Indonesian "Bajau
Bajau
The Bajau or Bajaw , also spelled Bajao, Badjau, Badjaw, or Badjao, are an indigenous ethnic group of Maritime Southeast Asia...
" fishermen from the Spice Islands
Maluku Islands
The Maluku Islands are an archipelago that is part of Indonesia, and part of the larger Maritime Southeast Asia region. Tectonically they are located on the Halmahera Plate within the Molucca Sea Collision Zone...
(e.g. Banda
Banda Islands
The Banda Islands are a volcanic group of ten small volcanic islands in the Banda Sea, about south of Seram Island and about east of Java, and are part of the Indonesian province of Maluku. The main town and administrative centre is Bandanaira, located on the island of the same name. They rise...
) have fished off the coast of Australia for hundreds of years. Macassan traders from Sulawesi
Sulawesi
Sulawesi is one of the four larger Sunda Islands of Indonesia and is situated between Borneo and the Maluku Islands. In Indonesia, only Sumatra, Borneo, and Papua are larger in territory, and only Java and Sumatra have larger Indonesian populations.- Etymology :The Portuguese were the first to...
(formerly Celebes) regularly visited the coast of northern Australia to fish for trepang (an edible sea cucumber
Sea cucumber (food)
Sea cucumbers are marine animals of the class Holothuroidea used in fresh or dried form in various cuisines.The creature and the food product is commonly known as bêche-de-mer in French, trepang in Indonesian, namako in Japanese and in the Philippines it is called balatan...
) to trade with the Chinese since at least the early 18th century (see the main article Macassan contact with Australia
Macassan contact with Australia
Macassan or more correctly Makassar trepangers from the southwest corner of Sulawesi visited the coast of northern Australia for hundreds of years to process trepang : a marine invertebrate prized for its culinary and medicinal values in Chinese markets.These visits have left their mark on the...
). Some historians believe that Tamil
Tamil people
Tamil people , also called Tamils or Tamilians, are an ethnic group native to Tamil Nadu, India and the north-eastern region of Sri Lanka. Historic and post 15th century emigrant communities are also found across the world, notably Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius, South Africa, Australia, Canada,...
sea-farers might have had knowledge of Australia and Polynesia
Polynesia
Polynesia is a subregion of Oceania, made up of over 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The indigenous people who inhabit the islands of Polynesia are termed Polynesians and they share many similar traits including language, culture and beliefs...
much before European contact.
The myths of the people of Arnhem Land
Arnhem Land
The Arnhem Land Region is one of the five regions of the Northern Territory of Australia. It is located in the north-eastern corner of the territory and is around 500 km from the territory capital Darwin. The region has an area of 97,000 km² which also covers the area of Kakadu National...
have preserved account of trepang-catching, rice-growing Baijini
Baijini
Baijini are a race of people mentioned in the Djanggawul song cycle of the aboriginal Yolngu people of Arnhem Land in Australia's Northern Territory.According to Ronald M...
people, who, according to the myths, were in Australia in the earliest times, before the Macassans. The Baijini have been variously interpreted by modern researchers as a different group of (presumably, SE Asian, such as Bajau
Bajau
The Bajau or Bajaw , also spelled Bajao, Badjau, Badjaw, or Badjao, are an indigenous ethnic group of Maritime Southeast Asia...
) visitors to Australia who may have visited Arnhem Land before the Macassans,
as a mythological reflection of the experiences of some Yolŋu people who have travelled to Sulawesi
Sulawesi
Sulawesi is one of the four larger Sunda Islands of Indonesia and is situated between Borneo and the Maluku Islands. In Indonesia, only Sumatra, Borneo, and Papua are larger in territory, and only Java and Sumatra have larger Indonesian populations.- Etymology :The Portuguese were the first to...
with the Macassans and came back, or, in more fringe views, even as visitors from China.
There was a high degree of cultural exchange, evidenced in Aboriginal rock and bark paintings
Australian Aboriginal art
Indigenous Australian art is art made by the Indigenous peoples of Australia and in collaborations between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians . It includes works in a wide range of media including painting on leaves, wood carving, rock carving, sculpture, ceremonial clothing and sandpainting...
, the introduction of technologies such as dug-out canoes and items such as tobacco and tobacco pipes, Macassan words in Aboriginal languages (e.g. Balanda for white person), and descendants of Malay
Malay race
The concept of a Malay race was proposed by the German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach , and classified as the brown race. Since Blumenbach, many anthropologists have rejected his theory of five races, citing the enormous complexity of classifying races...
people in Australian Aboriginal communities and vice versa, as a result of intermarriage and migration.
See also
- Australian archaeologyAustralian archaeologyAustralian Archaeology is a large sub-field in the discipline of Archaeology. Archaeology in Australia takes three main forms, Aboriginal Archaeology , Historical Archaeology and Maritime Archaeology...
- Ten CanoesTen CanoesTen Canoes is a 2006 film. It was directed by Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr and starred Crusoe Kurddal. The title of the film arose from discussions between de Heer and David Gulpilil about a photograph of ten canoeists poling across the Arafura Swamp, taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson in...
, a 2006 film about Australian prehistory - Mungo Man
- DreamtimeDreamtimeIn the animist framework of Australian Aboriginal mythology, The Dreaming is a sacred era in which ancestral Totemic Spirit Beings formed The Creation.-The Dreaming of the Aboriginal times:...
, Aboriginal mythology about Australian prehistory