Source: GeorgiaBeforePeople
I admit, I’m being a little hard on archaeologists in my reaction to a recent article in NewScientist (25 January 2020, paywall), “The epic ocean journey that took Stone Age people to Australia,” by Graham Lawton, concerning questions of how humans migrated 65,000 year ago from East Asia to Sahul, a prehistoric continent composed of Australia, New Guinea, Tasmania, and what is now seabed. A difficult crossing, particularly if there was little reason to think there was anything to find on the other end, …
That goes a long way to explaining why, until recently, the prevailing view was that the sea crossings between Asia and Sahul presented such an obstacle that deliberate migration was unthinkable. People must have arrived on the currents after being washed into the sea by a tsunami or flood, perhaps clinging to a mat of floating vegetation or a raft of pumice.
The striking part for me is the tendency of the scientists to assume either random chance, as above, or peaceful, cooperative ventures:
The other new line of evidence supporting a planned migration comes from Corey Bradshaw of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and his colleagues. They modelled the demographics of colonisation, taking account of typical hunter-gatherer fertility rates and longevity and the ecological conditions they would have encountered after landing in Sahul. The calculations revealed that the minimum founding population was 1300 people, perhaps all at once or in smaller groups over many years, which all but rules out accidental colonisation.
The peopling of Sahul was “probably planned”, Bradshaw concludes. Bird agrees. “It is not feasible that people randomly got there,” he says. “They had to think about it and they came in large numbers.” Why they came is a different question. But the chances are they were driven by dwindling resources, or simply the lure of the unknown, says Bird.
But what is so difficult about imagining a falling out? To me, while I do not have access to the knowledge of the scientists, it’s a little hard to believe the resources of a continent were being exhausted by a comparatively light sprinkling of human bands, unless the climate, being in an ice age at the time, had put the squeeze on both meat and non-meat resources.
But conflict, aye, that’s immune to resource depletion, isn’t it? One group, a fracturing of the group over some slight that swiftly grows to existential proportions; an arbitrary and capricious religious tenet or ruling, forcing one group to submit and even face death, or escape; a disgust with the current ruling class, and rather than eliminate them, leave.
Or even an oversupply of testosterone. The explorer who finds an unknown land may have attracted mates that were scarce.
Without a written history, much less artifacts, proving these sorts of hypotheses is, of course, nearly impossible. But the things that drive humanity are not limited to resources or even mates; the madness of religion has motivated various sects of humanity to do amazing, wonderful, grotesque, and even impenetrable things.
And, reading the above article, I felt that such a possibility was being completely ignored.
