The first people in Australia

The story

A continent cut off by the sea

Australia is, and always was, an enormous island. There has never been a land route to it from Asia. Even in the coldest periods of the last ice age, when so much water was locked up in the ice and the sea level fell by about a hundred metres, there was always sea between south-east Asia and Australia. At those times Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania were joined into a single big continent, which scientists call Sahul. On the Asian side there was another emerged continent, Sunda, which included Malaysia, Sumatra, Java and Borneo. Between the two there was a zone of islands, called Wallacea, with deep waters and strong currents.

Anyone who wanted to reach Sahul therefore had to sail, in several stages. Some of the stretches to be crossed were tens of kilometres long, up to about a hundred, and the land they were heading for was often out of sight. An international group of researchers tried to simulate on a computer, in studies of 2018 and 2019, the possible routes, with the winds, currents and sea levels of that time. The conclusion: it is not plausible that these journeys were accidental, dragged along by the waves. They must have been planned, with craft able to stand up to the sea.

When they arrived

The date is disputed. A site in the north of the continent, called Madjedbebe, on Mirarr land, near Kakadu National Park, has yielded stone tools, ochre and fragments of ground-edge axes. In 2017 the archaeologists led by Chris Clarkson announced that the first signs of human presence there go back to about 65,000 years ago. Other scholars think that some of the tools moved downwards in the ground and that the safest date is about 50,000 years. The date of 50,000 years is today accepted by almost everyone.

Another piece of evidence comes from a very different region, Lake Mungo, in the south-east, where a series of lakes, dry today, are surrounded by dunes. In the late 1960s the scientist Jim Bowler found there the remains of a woman, the so-called “Mungo Lady”, who had been cremated: it is among the oldest known cremations. In 1974 he also found the skeleton of a man, “Mungo Man”, laid carefully to rest and sprinkled with ochre. The two people were about 40,000 years old. In 2017 the remains were returned to the local Aboriginal communities.

If in 10,000 years people went from Africa to Australia, the pace is impressive. But remember that they were small groups, moving little by little along the coasts, where they found shellfish, fish and fruit.

A land of giant animals

The Australia they met was different from today's. There lived Diprotodon, a marsupial as big as a rhinoceros, Genyornis, a big flightless bird about two metres tall, and Thylacoleo, the “marsupial lion”. Almost all the big animals disappeared in a period that scholars place between 45,000 and 40,000 years ago. People have argued for decades about why: the climate, hunting, fires lit by humans, or a combination of causes. There is no single answer accepted by everyone.

Cultures that continue

Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders descend from these first inhabitants. DNA studies show that Aboriginal populations are among the oldest in the world outside Africa, separated from those of Eurasia for a very long time. When the Europeans arrived, in the eighteenth century, about 250 different languages were spoken, on a continent as big as Europe, with ways of life suited to deserts, forests, coasts and mountains. Many languages disappeared after colonisation, but others are still alive, and studying and defending them is very important today.

Aboriginal communities keep stories that tell of places and events from the most distant past. Some speak of territories drowned by the sea at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, an event that scientists have reconstructed from geological data. They are stories passed on by word of mouth for generations. Other stories linked to the “Dreaming” explain how the mountains, rivers and animals were created, and connect people to the place where they live in a very deep way.

At a site called Budj Bim, in the south-east, the Gunditjmara community built, at least 6,600 years ago, stone channels and ponds to farm eels: one of the oldest aquaculture systems in the world. It shows that Australian hunter-gatherers were not “simple” at all: they knew how to manage the land with refined engineering.