Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- List of figures
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Going to Sunda: Lower Pleistocene transcontinental migration
- 2 Pleistocene population growth
- 3 From Sunda to Sahul: transequatorial migration in the Upper Pleistocene
- 4 Upper Pleistocene migration patterns on Sahul
- 5 Palaeoenvironments, megafauna and the Upper Pleistocene settlement of Central Australia
- 6 Upper Pleistocene Australians: the Willandra people
- 7 Origins: a morphological puzzle
- 8 Migratory time frames and Upper Pleistocene environmental sequences in Australia
- 9 An incomplete jigsaw puzzle
- Appendix 1
- Appendix 2
- Appendix 3
- References
- Index
6 - Upper Pleistocene Australians: the Willandra people
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- List of figures
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Going to Sunda: Lower Pleistocene transcontinental migration
- 2 Pleistocene population growth
- 3 From Sunda to Sahul: transequatorial migration in the Upper Pleistocene
- 4 Upper Pleistocene migration patterns on Sahul
- 5 Palaeoenvironments, megafauna and the Upper Pleistocene settlement of Central Australia
- 6 Upper Pleistocene Australians: the Willandra people
- 7 Origins: a morphological puzzle
- 8 Migratory time frames and Upper Pleistocene environmental sequences in Australia
- 9 An incomplete jigsaw puzzle
- Appendix 1
- Appendix 2
- Appendix 3
- References
- Index
Summary
Whichever theory one prefers, it is apparent that there is a general acceptance that the early populations of South-east Asia included both a robust fossil type and a more slender (?later) form, the former being similar if not ancestral to the modern australoids.
(Brothwell, 1960: 341)Introduction
The previous five chapters of this book described processes leading to the entry of people into Australia and the impact of those people on the animals and the landscape. The discussion included growth of world population during the last 1 My, the methods and pattern of migration, demographic and genetic processes leading to the arrival of people in Australia and the environmental setting and possible consequences of their arrival. I now want to examine who these first Australians were and where they came from. Whatever the world's population was doing at that time and whoever it was that undertook these migrations across the globe, Australia was at the receiving end of the I have already hinted at the possible genetic complexities that could arise from migrations moving through South East Asia and Indonesia and how difficult these could make sorting out the ‘origins’ of the first Australians. This difficulty is compounded further when we consider the extremely limited fossil sample available in Australia and the fact that it may be too young to be of any real help to us.
The claim that widely differing populations arrived in Australia is not guesswork, the fossil record demonstrates this emphatically.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The First Boat People , pp. 183 - 232Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006