1. WHO REALLY DISCOVERED AUSTRALIA?
Hint: It wasn't Captain James Cook.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/1981_event_Australian_aboriginals.jpg Nambassa 1981 Arnhemland and Torrest Strait dance company.jpg - Image (photograph) taken by Official Nambassa Photographer and uploaded by User:StoneHenge007, Nambassa dot com Terms of Use: "en:Nambassa Trust and Peter Terry". " http://www.nambassa.com
.This is Part 1 of a series to answer the curious question: WHO REALLY DISCOVERED AUSTRALIA? Become a free or paid subscriber to Michael’s Curious world for full access to the posts, my ‘Newbies Gide to Substack’ and other resources as we search for and explore the elusive sixth continent Sahul..
CONTENTS:
How did it all begin?
Australia is reached
They keep coming
Humans spread south
Madjedebe
Nauwalabila - the second-oldest human site in Australia
Oldest human remains in Australia
WHEN I went to school, they told us Captain James Cook discovered Australia, because accounts of our history were written by the British.
No-one mentioned the Aborigines, Chinese, Dutch, Portuguese, Makassans, Spanish, French, Papuans, Torres Strait Islanders, Pacific Islanders, Maori or others who might have bumped into the world’s largest island over the history of humanity.
I always figured there had to be more to it than Cook, but life got in the way of finding out until recently, when curiosity finally got the better of me. Now I know they were wrong, by up to about 65,000 years, a massive margin for error.
Even Captain Cook, admirable explorer though he was of other places, was actually a very late arrival, didn’t discover that much of Australia, and was almost gazumped by Napoleon’s French and the Dutch.
One thing we can be absolutely sure about is the Aborigines got here first, by a large margin.
The Chinese may also have skirted our northern coastline while trading and exploring around Southeast Asia across to the Middle East and Africa.
Some claim Portuguese navigators came here in the 15th Century while journeying past Africa and through Southeast Asia, since they were definitely in Timor which is only 650 kilometres from our continent, but this is unproven.
Makassans from modern Indonesia got here in the 15th Century, if not earlier, trading with Aborigines and fishing along our northern coastline. People from northern Asia including Taiwan also migrated south into the Pacific Islands.
The first European who is confirmed to have landed on the Australian continent was Dutchman Willem Janszoon way back in 1606, 164 years before Cook. But what really happened? Let’s start at the beginning.
BTW I’m not going to footnote everything because each post is limited by the maximum size of a Gmail, as I explain in my ‘Newbies Guide to Substack’, so I’d rather use the space for content. All sites consulted are publicly available for further research through aggregators such as Wikipedia, The Australian Dictionary of Biography and the National Museum of Australia.
How did it all begin?
Homo sapiens similar to modern humans are believed to have emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago, based on dating studies in Morocco, South Africa, Ethiopia and later in Greece. 1
They began expanding out of Africa about 125,000 years ago through the Nile Valley, Sinai Peninsula, the Levant, Red Sea and Arabian Peninsula, reaching China at least 100,000 years ago. We can argue about specifics, but that’s the overall picture.
Some early migratory groups did not survive, but there was another wave of migrations about 75,000-50,000 years ago, interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans, according to mitochondrial and other studies.
Australia is reached
Migrations continued along the South Asian coast into Oceania, progressively colonising Australia by around 65,000–50,000 years ago. 1
Homo sapiens came to dominate, while other human species such as Neanderthals and Denisovians, were absorbed or decimated.
DNA studies show Denisovan ancestry is shared by Melanesians, Aboriginal Australians and smaller scattered groups of people in Southeast Asia, while Neanderthals were out-competed or had inter-bred with homo sapiens by about 25,000 years ago.
During that time the sea level was much lower because the climate was colder, so the sailing distance from Timor to Australia might have been as little as 90 kilometres. 2
Most of maritime South-East Asia formed one land mass known as Sunda, while Sahul was the combined land mass of present-day Australia and New Guinea.
Migration continued on the coastal route to the straits between Sunda and Sahul via a land bridge, crossing the sea at the so-called Wallace Line, island-hopping via an island chain between Sulawesi and New Guinea, and reaching North Western Australia via Timor.
The map shows the probable extent of land and water at the time of the last glacial maximum, 20,000 yrs ago and when the sea level was probably more than 110m lower than today. By listfiles/Kanguole - Own work, based on file:map of Sunda and Sahul.png and using Coastline from Natural Earth 1:50m Physical Vectors125m depth contour derived from 2-Minute Gridded Global Relief Data (ETOPO2) v2, NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, using gdal_contour (from GDAL)., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=127823375
Genomic studies suggest the peopling of Australia happened between 43,000 to 60,000 years ago. Sequencing of one Aboriginal genome from an old hair sample in Western Australia revealed the individual was descended from people who migrated into East Asia between 62,000 and 75,000 years ago.
https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/the-spread-of-people-to-australia/.
They keep coming
The main migration is believed to have happened from around 50,000 years ago, before Australia and New Guinea were separated by rising sea levels about 8,000 years ago.
This is supported by a date of 50,000–60,000 years ago for the oldest evidence of settlement in Australia, 40,000 years ago for the oldest human remains, the earliest human artifacts which are at least 65,000 years old and the extinction of the Australian megafauna by humans between 46,000 and 15,000 years ago.
Successive dispersals of Homo erectus greatest extent (yellow), Homo neanderthalensis greatest extent (ochre) during Out of Africa and Homo sapiens (red, Out of Africa II), with the numbers of years since they appeared before present. By NordNordWest - Spreading homo sapiens ru.svg by Urutseg which based on Spreading homo sapiens.jpg by Altaileopard, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34697001
Humans spread south
A 2021 study suggests the populating of Sahul took 5,000–6,000 years to reach south to Tasmania at about one kilometre per year, after making landfall in the Kimberley around 60,000 years ago.
The total human population could have been as high as 6.4 million, with 3 million in the area of modern Australia, by some estimates.
How did they spread out? They may have followed two main routes.
One route went through the Kimberley, Pilbara and Arnhem Land to the Great Sandy Desert before moving towards Lake Eyre and the southeast of the continent, or Margaret River and the Nullabor Plain.
The other route from the north crossed over the Torres Strait and then divided into one path connecting to Arnhem Land and another leading down the East Coast.
Madjedebe
Madjedebe is the oldest known human site in Australia. 1 A sandstone rock shelter in Arnhem Land, Madjedebe dates from the late Pleistocene age (2.5 million – 11,700 years ago).
It has been studied since 1973, with major archaeological excavations including thermoluminescence dating by Rhys Jones and Christopher Chippindale and geochronologist Richard 'Bert' Roberts in 1988. A 2017 study by Clarkson et al., yielded evidence Madjedebe was first occupied by humans by 65,000 +/- 6,000 years ago and at least by 50,000 years ago.
It is part of the lands traditionally inhabited by the Minarr clan of the Gaagudju people of the Gunwinyguan language group, within the Jabiru Mineral Leasehold, surrounded by the Kakadu National Park.
The upper 60 cm of the site was rich shell midden with abundant shells, faunal remains, stone artefacts and human remains. Below this the site was very sandy and contained mostly stone artefacts.
More than 100,000 artefacts have been excavated, including 10,000 artefacts from the lowest dense occupation layer, such as flaked stone artefacts, ground stone axe heads, grinding stones, animal bones, shellfish remains, ground ochre, charcoal, seeds and human burials, up to more than 2.5 metres below the surface.
Archaeobotanical investigations have demonstrated the exploitation of plant foods, including seeds, tubers and pandanus nuts. Fuel wood was also sourced from local eucalyptus and monsoon vine thicket forests.
The rock shelters at Madjedbebe (about 50 kilometres inland from the present coast) and at Nauwalabila (70 kilometres further south) show evidence of ochre used by artists long ago.
In 2012 a research team from the Australian National University systematically documented the rock art at the site, under the auspices of the Mirarr Gunwarddebim Project, recording more than 1000 motifs at the site.
As many of the images are faded overlap, this is the minimum number of motifs at the site that can be seen today and there would have been many hundreds more present that no longer survive.
A variety of different coloured pigments have been used to create the art at Madjedbebe. These are mostly ochres (red, yellow and orange), but many are also white clay (kaolinite) and some black charcoal.
The Madjedbebe motifs include many human-like figures ('anthropomorphs'), geometric designs, hand stencils, fish (including catfish, barramundi, freshwater long-tom, mullet and saratoga) and fibre objects.
Objects depicted from the 'European-contact period' include firearms, European people (wearing clothing, hats and standing in a characteristic 'hands on hip' manner), pipes, knives and ships. This suggests the majority of the art presented today was created in the last 1500 years.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madjedbebe
Nauwalabila
Nauwalabila, (formerly known as the Lindner Site), is a sandstone rock shelter located in the Kakadu National Park and is one of the first human settlements in Australia, estimated to be older than 50,000 years. 1.
It was initially excavated in 1972-73 by Johan Kamminga and Harry Allen, and more thoroughly by Rhy Jones and Ian Johnson in 1981, uncovering over 30,000 stone artifacts from the site, which was 3.0m in depth.
The upper 2.5m of the deposit consisted of distinct stratigraphic layers of sand, while the lower contained rubble and compacted sand. Charcoal samples from this excavation were also collected for radiocarbon dating.
In 1989, Bert Roberts conducted another excavation on the original deposit, this time collecting samples for optically simulated luminescence (OSL) and TL dating methods. Dates in the 50-60,000 range are generally accepted, although there is debate about the possible effect of termites.
Stone tools at the site have been dated up to 30,000 years ago. Ochre fragments and rock art, showing handprints, macropods, reptiles, humans and axes, have been dated back about 13,000 years.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauwalabila_I
Devil’s Lair in the extreme south-west of the continent was occupied around 47,000 years ago and Tasmania by 39,000 years ago.
Stone tools at Penrith near Sydney have been found in gravel sediments from 45,000 to 50,000 years ago. Karnatukul (Serpent's Glen) in the Carnarvon Range in the Little Sandy Desert in WA was dated at around 50,000 years.
Oldest human remains in Australia
The oldest human remains found in Australia are at Lake Mungo in New South Wales at 41,000 years ago, and are one of the world's oldest known cremations, indicating religious ritual.
Lake Mungo is a dry lake located about 760 km due west of Sydney and 90 km (56 miles) north-east of Mildura. The lake is the central feature of Mungo National Park and in the traditional land of the Barkindji, Nyiampaar and Mutthi Mutthi.
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