There is considerable uncertainty on when Australia was populated. Certain are the current human species reached it on rafts. Likely they were built from bamboo. What we know is the straits being too wide to see across. So how could people know Australia was there? I think they saw smoke from wildfires. Even today people can stand on Timor and see smoke from bushfires on the Australian mainland. It was possible to tell the difference between fire smoke and volcanic smoke too. The later could as well come from an underwater volcano.
Australia and New Guinea were fused during the ice ages. I think it was still two waves which populated these landmasses. There are considerable genetic differences between Aborigines and Papuans. So I think they mostly descend from two different immigration waves. One would have ended up in what is now Australia after seeing smoke from bushfire. Another came to New Guinea after following smoke from forest fire. During the ice ages the tropics were drier making them more likely.
South of southeastern Australia is the cooler island of Tasmania. During the ice ages it was fused to the Australian mainland. When the ice sheets heavily shrunk the seas rose as a result. The connection with the mainland was flooded by the rising seas. Aborigines did not have access to technology for crossing this strait. A few thousand people were isolated from the rest of humanity for at least 8,000 years. Those which had come there had the Aborigines’ technology. But during the course of millennia it gradually degenerated. Eventually people did not know how to stick two objects together. Please note this was about what they got the chance to learn. The period was far too short for the brains to degenerate.
Many have a picture of Australia as a hot and dry country. This holds true for large parts of the interior of the country. However, this area is surrounded by scrubland, prairie and in the north savannah. Along parts of the coasts grows woods and forest. But even the greener areas are as a rule less lush than comparable on other continents. Australia’s soils are usually lean which limits the vegetation. There are a small number of areas where the soil is more fertile. However, these are relatively small and hard to get between.
As a consequence Australia’s mainland came to be very sparsely populated. The Aborigines were never more than a few hundred thousand people. This on an entire continent although it is the smallest. As follows from this technological development came to be extremely slow. In historical times there have been practices resembling gardening. Bu the development towards agriculture never reached monoculture. For this reason I don’t consider them to have ever developed agriculture fully.
It should be pointed out the dingo is imported from Eurasia. It came in the form of the dog through sailors from Southeast Asia. One may wonder why the agriculture did not spread through them to Australia. I think they happened to get ashore where their crops could not grow. Or they tried to do so and failed due to the climate being unreliable. Amounts of rain in greener parts of the country vary greatly over time. This makes agriculture too unreliable for low tech establishment. Only dogs survived and became partially feral. Some got to grow up with humans. However, they were let free when they were two years old. Those which then survived were considered wild animals. Today they are potentially dangerous which is not obvious.
New Guinea is the world’s second largest island and partially volcanically active. It lies closely south of the Equator and is mainly coved by jungle. Some areas in the south has savannah similar to the one in Australia. The rest of the island is extremely difficult. It does not help the island has a defiance in large warm-blooded animals. The largest ones which are indigenous are two species of cassowary. This is a matter of flightless birds which are very aggressive. All other indigenous animals which were large and warm-blooded have been extinguished by humanity.
The highlands of New Guinea is one of the areas were agriculture arose. The crops first cultivated there were banana and breadfruit. Long later root vegetables were introduced with their origin in Southeast Asia. It was then elephant foot yam, taro and ube. Together with those root vegetables dog and pig were introduced. But there are no such large differences in what they and we can eat. It is only the highlands themselves which are suitable for intense agriculture too. Together these put limits to how many people could live there. In this way state societies were stopped from developing there. All other areas of the world where agriculture arose have such.
Uploaded on the 10th of April 2025.
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