Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Saturday November 05 2016, @03:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-a-big-island dept.

The speed at which the first Aboriginal settlers spread across Australia has been underlined by the discovery of an ancient rock shelter north of Adelaide.

The rock fissure in the Flinders Ranges contains tools and other artefacts that date back to around 49,000 years ago.

That means Aboriginal people must have colonised large parts of the continent within a few millennia of their arrival.

Details of the Warratyi shelter are reported in the journal Nature.

"It is the southernmost oldest site in the continent (there is another site in southwestern Australia called Devil's Lair, which is quite old), but in terms of inland occupation, it's significant geographically because it shows people are moving very quickly around the continent and into the interior part of the continent," lead scientist Giles Hamm told BBC News.

Colonizing large parts of Australia "within a few millennia of their arrival," in roughly the same time span as the entire history of Western Civilization, is "speedy?"


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 05 2016, @11:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 05 2016, @11:08PM (#422941)

    You may be onto something. In the article they say there's evidence of hunting.

  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday November 07 2016, @02:48PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Monday November 07 2016, @02:48PM (#423516)

    Considering that the Aborigines were largely hunter-gatherers when Europeans invaded (though there's evidence they also engaged in intensification), it seems at least somewhat unlikely that they started out as an agricultural society when they colonized Australia, though I suppose there might have been climate shifts that made agriculture infeasible.

    It's also worth considering that both the Mesopotamian and Chinese cultures didn't start developing agriculture until around 10,000BC, about 37,000 years after Australia was colonized, and the Americas were even later to the party. It would be pretty surprising if the colonizing culture already had agriculture, but it didn't spread anywhere else in the world for another 40 millenia.