The Upper Palaeolithic was the period in which behaviorally
modern
humans spread over all the world's continents except Antarctica. This
phase was followed by the emergence of farming on all the inhabited
continents with the exception of Australia. This continent tells us
what the world would have looked like if the Neolithic revolution had
not happened. Australia provides us with and expereiment in which a few
hundred thousand hunter-gatherers had a continent to themselves until
the eighteenth century.
Greater Australia-the combination of Australia, New
Guinea, and
Tasmania -has been separated from any other continent bar Antarctica
for some seventy million years. Since parting from Antarctica it has
moved closer to Southeast Asia, but, as we already noted, the two
landmasses remain separated by open sea even in an ice age. As a
result, few placental land mammals made the crossing before modern
times; bats, rodents, humans, and dogs were the exceptions. This in
turn made it possible for Australia to retain numerous species of
nonplacental mammals, notably marsupials, as late as the time when
humans first arrived. This began with the voyages of the Dutch
navigators of the seventeenth century. Then, in 1788, the British
established their first settlement at Sydney in southeastern Australia.
Thereafter two centuries of colonization drastically reduced the size
of the native population, and effectively put an end to the hunter-
gatherer way of life that isolation had protected for so long.
A second reason why farming did not appear in Australia
before modern
times is that the continent provided a distinctly unfriendly
environment for its independent emergence. Rather flat and heavily
eroded, Australia is short on recent geological disturbance. This
geological passivity has had the effect of limiting soil formation,
which is one reason why Australia is not particularly fertile. Another
reason is that much of it is arid, not to say desert, particularly in
the center and west and even in the best-watered regions the rainfall
is unreliable. These conditions imposed significant limits on
Australia's plants and animals. There was forest, particularly on the
east coast where the highlands brought down the rain. But grasslands
were not extensive. Moreover, the larger nonplacental mammals, many of
them herbivorous marsupials, suffered extinction after the arrival of
humans, and very likely because of it. Altogether, there was not much
to domesticate.
These conditions mean that that the emergence of farming
was an
unlikely event.
The story of humans in Australia until the eighteenth
century was
accordingly a story of hunter- gatherers, and by the same token a story
without metalworking, cities, kingdoms, or written records. Nor did the
Australians make pottery. This means that, for most of its course, we
can know about Australian prehistory only from the same kinds of
sources as we possess for the European Upper Palaeolithic: an abundance
of stone tools, eked out with some skeletal remains, some rock art, and
the like.
In summary, it
is well established that there were humans in Australia around forty thousand
years ago. Dates that might take this back another twenty thousand years have not been
confirmed, and even older dates have been discredited. This gives modern humans the same
antiquity in Australia as in Europe. Since they had to cross the sea from Southeast Asia to
reach Greater Australia, they must have had some kind of raft or boat; this is borne out by the
fact that in the same early period they were also able to colonize islands to the east of New
Guinea. By thirty thousand years ago humans were widespread in Australia, though they may
not have moved into the more arid parts of the interior until Holocene times. As in Upper
Palaeolithic Europe, artefacts are found such as some of the world's oldest beads, for instance,
and probably some very old axes with handles. These artefacts are around around thirty
thousand years old. The axes look pretty much like the kind still in use in the nineteenth
century. We are particularly lucky that some wooden implements dating back about twelve
thousand years survive in a swamp, including the first known boomerangs. For the last few
thousand years the archaeological record is much richer but this evidence supports a
continuation of the hunter-gatherer way of life that was established in Australia some forty
thousand years ago, were significantly different from earlier times
