Australia: The Land Where Time Began
| Home |
| Journey Back Through Time |
| Geology |
| Biology |
| Fauna |
| Flora |
| Climate |
| Hydrology |
| Environment |
| Experience Australia |
| Aboriginal Australia |
| National Parks |
| Photo Galleries |
| Site Map |
Australoids
Since the the Aborigines were first seen by European explorers their origins has been the subject of debate.
Human Remains
By 1989 1350 individuals had been discovered in the Willandra Lakes region. Among the remains from this region there were both robust and gracile forms of both sexes. There was also a variety of burial practices, cremation, inhumation and bone smashing.
- Current Anthropology
- http://www.modernhumanorigins.net/wlh50.htm
- http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=1557539
It has been established that there was a large amount of morphological variability among Pleistocene Australians, from the gracile to the robust at the other end of the continuum. It has been suggested that the morphological variability among the late Pleistocene populations of Australia resulted from genetic mutation, drift and selection, as the migrants moved into new environments.
The present Australian Aborigines are among the most morphologically diverse peoples in the world. Now that a lot of evidence from the Pleistocene in Australia has been studied it seems that diversity has been present for a long time, in fact it was more pronounced in the past.
Joseph Birdsell and Norman Tindale proposed 3 migrations during the Pleistocene of Oceanic Negritos, Murrayians and Carpentarians. The Tasmanians were considered by them to be Oceanic Negritos, based mainly on their small stature and spiral hair. 12 Aboriginal tribes from the rainforests of north Queensland were also believed by Birdsell and Tindale to be of this type. Analysis of skeletons of these people failed to show any negrito components among the rainforest Aborigines. Genetic studies have shown that pygmie peoples are not racially distinct from other non-pygmy groups, but rather are more probably adaptations to their environment.
In Tasmania analysis of skeletal remains from 3 sites, King Island, West Point Midden and Mount Cameron West, show no differences between them and contemporary Pleistocene peoples in the mainland. Any differences between modern Tasmanian Aborigines and those on the mainland are now believed to have arisen during the 10,000 years of isolation from the mainland after the sea rose to cover the Bassian Plain joining the island to the mainland.
Birdsell's Carpentarians are now thought to have resulted from mixing with non-Aboriginal peoples from the north. People from Indonesia, e.g., Macassan traders, had been trading with the Aborigines long before the arrival of Europeans in Australia. And a people of unknown origin, the Baiini, for some time before the Macassans. The Aboriginal men from the northern regions where the Baiini apparently landed and stayed for a while found their women so attractive the memory of their beauty has been included in the songs and stories, as well as in names girls' names.
There is still no general consensus among anthropologists on most features of Australian Aborigines, apart from 2 facts, they are Homo sapiens, and there was a great deal of variability among the Pleistocene populations. They are yet to explain the large amount of cranial variation in Pleistocene populations, and the more archaic appearance of some early Australian Homo sapiens.
- Josephine Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, J. B. Publishing
- Phillip J. Habgood & Natilie R. Franklin, The revolution that didn't arrive: A review of Pleistocene Sahul, Journal of Human Evolution, 55, 2008
Links
- The Middle Palaeolithic and late Pleistocene Tasmania hunting behaviour: a reconsideration of the attributes of modern human behaviour
- http://books.google.com/books?id=zTgG82RLc6MC&printsec=frontcover
- An Australasian test of the recent African origin theory using the WLH-50 calvarium
- On the reliability of recent tests of the Out of Africa hypothesis for modern human origins