Introduction

The main purpose of this volume is to provide empirical data concerning the health of Australia's original inhabitants over the last 50,000 years. The trouble with such a task is that the palaeopathological evidence on which it is based is comparatively slight, because of its limited disease spectrum, and incomplete in terms of the skeletal material that is available. Unfortunately, we have no data for thousands of years at a time and when it is available it almost always covers only a minute part of the continent. Nevertheless, one must remain undaunted by these constraints as well as being slightly buoyed by the fact that this is the nature of this type of study for any area of the globe. Therefore, in the first part of this chapter I will try and gather together the meagre evidence for the health of people living in the Australian late Pleistocene. The second part puts together a more complete picture of Aboriginal health in the Holocene. It compares and contrasts different parts of the continent and interprets health in terms of the wider lifestyle of Aboriginal people and how they lived.

No doubt some people will disagree with certain diagnoses, that is normal in palaeopathology; others will reject the social and demographic conclusions and implications that I have made based on these. In the end it is my hope that the presentation of the data in itself will improve our understanding of Aboriginal health, demography, ecology, epidemiology, palaeobiology and the adaptive capabilities of the people that lived here before European colonisation.