THE GEOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND TO THE ARRIVAL OF MAN IN AUSTRALIA AND TASMANIA

Abstract

A USTRALIA and the Americas were both colonized for the first time during ?' the last Ice Age by a physically modern man, employing advanced Palaeolithic technologies. In both cases, man entered a new continent, adapting his own culture to deal with unfamiliar country, animals and plants, and conversely subjecting the environment to the ecological pressures of his own technology to which it had never before been exposed. The colonization may be seen as part of a general geographical expansion carried out by late Palaeolithic man, the move into Australia predating that into the Americas by at least 10,000 years. Their completion left the polar ice caps, and some islands of the Pacific and elsewhere, as the only significant areas of land still to be claimed. To get to America, the first colonists derived from the Gravettoid cultures of northern Eurasia, would have had to negotiate glacial or periglacial conditions, but their journey could have been carried out overland, and many of the plants and animals in the new region would have been familiar to them. Australia, however, could only have been reached by sea, the several water barriers of Wallacea (Darlington 1957 : 462) providing the shortest crossings, and the continent beyond, isolated since the early Tertiary, contained a largely endemic and highly distinctive flora and fauna. Most of the early Australian stone industries are characterized by flat convex edge, steep concave edge and high domed scrapers , with considerable regional variation. Their closest analogues are found in the late Palaeolithic Middle Stone Age industries of sub-Saharan Africa and India from which they were probably derived. The paucity of information about the Palaeolithic succession in the Asiatic neighbours of Australia does not yet permit closer comparison.