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RFalvo69 -> RE: American convicts in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) (4/27/2021 10:21:41 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Neilster
If you want to know what the first modern humans were like, Australian Aborigines are about the closest thing to them. It now looks like they arrived here quite quickly after humans left Africa, probably hugging the coasts around India and SE Asia. Like the first people to populate the Americas many thousands of years later, they found a huge land full of new animals who had never experienced hominins before.
They probably played a major role in the extinction of the Australian megafauna, as those animals had survived several climate cycles before, but eventually they worked out how to manage the land sustainably. Mostly Australia's soils were unsuitable for farming, so they remained hunter-gatherers. There were a few places with considerable resources though, and there they built permanent dwellings, and practised aquaculture, for example.
Their Dreamtime stories made perfect sense to their way of life. Some of them are so old they even refer to megafauna that haven't existed for tens of thousands of years. For example, they remember the giant short-faced Kangaroo, and say they were aggressive and attacked people. Modern paleontologists then found fossils of them, who went extinct 15,000 years ago and which fed on leaves rather than grass, and walked, not hopped. There is rock art that probably depicts them, as well as Tasmanian Tigers and the marsupial lion.
They thought the stars were the campfires of their ancestors, who now lived in the sky. They had complicated songlines, which were vital in many ways, especially finding water in the arid parts of Australia. There was a complicated trading network that encompassed all of mainland Australia. Beginning about 400 years ago they started having sporadic contact with European explorers and they traded with Indonesian vessels, but in 1788 the British started Sydney and their world fell apart. The same thing happened in Tasmania, where disease and conflict wiped the full-blooded aborigines out by 1876, despite a kind-of effort to save them at the last minute. I have several friends who are part aboriginal though, and many places now have dual or wholly aboriginal names.
Those are wonderful infos! Thanks Neilster!
On my Kindle for iPad I have a free book titled "Under the Southern Cross or Travels in Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Samoa, and Other Pacific Islands" - by Maturin Murray Ballou (1888). I don't even remember when I downloaded it. Time to read it [:)]
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