How Aboriginal People Survived The Last Ice Age

Found on Sovereign Union's Facebook Page here: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1083452677155134&set=a.642304697936603

A 2013 published study revealed how First Nations people coped with the last Ice Age, roughly 20,000 years ago.

"Population numbers plummeted due to harsh conditions at the peak of the last Ice Age", says the study.

Researchers say that when the climate cooled dramatically, Aboriginal groups sought refuge in well-watered areas, such as along rivers, and populations were condensed into small habitable areas.

Professor Sean Ulm, lead author of the research at James Cook University in Townsville, says the vast majority of Australia was simply uninhabitable at this time. "Forests disappeared, animals went extinct; major areas of Australia would have been deprived of surface water."

To understand how Aboriginal people responded to the conditions, a team of experts from Australia, England, and Canada used the radiocarbon dates of thousands of archaeological sites to study the distribution of people across the landscape over time.

The findings, published recently in The Journal of Archaeological Science[1], suggest that about 21,000 years ago, almost all people in modern-day Australia migrated into smaller areas, abandoning as much as 80 per cent of the continent.

"In Lawn Hill Gorge in northwestern Queensland, at the coldest point of the last glacial period, all of the stone, raw materials and food remains are exclusively from the Gorge area," says Sean. "This indicated very limited or no use of the surrounding broader landscape."

This massive consolidation had drastic effects on the population as well. "There was likely a birth rate decline of over 60 per cent," says Alan Williams, a PhD student at the Australian Nation University who worked on the study. "It would have been very ugly."

Can humans cope with climate change?

Sean says the next step would ideally be to study the resulting cultural shifts, however, this may prove to be difficult given that close to one third of what was Australia at the time of the Ice Age is now underwater. "By 10,000 years ago, sea levels were visibly rising, sometimes on a daily basis," says Sean.

Extreme changes in the environment continued for thousands of years, and Aboriginal life readjusted in the process. Sean says this makes it unlikely that researchers will ever know the full societal ramifications of the Ice Age.

What the study does reveal, however, is that humans have withstood massive climate change on this continent in the past, and this might prove vital for preparing for future events.

"A lot of the current climate reports that we read about in Australia...their records only go back a couple of hundred years," says Sean. "That's a very short time span to base our model for future climate change on."

Sean adds that, thanks to studies like this, archaeologists may soon have the potential to extend these data sets.

- Article - Reasearch Paper review by Wes Judd 'Australian Geographic' 27 September 2013

[1] RESEARCH PAPER: 'Human refugia in Australia during the Last Glacial Maximum and Terminal Pleistocene: a geospatial analysis of the 25–12 ka Australian archaeological record'

- By ALAN N.WILLIAMS James Cook University,
- ANDREW R.COOK University of New South Wales;
- MICHELLE C. LANGLEY University of Oxford, UK;
- MARK COLLARDE Human Evolutionary Studies Program and Department of Archaeology, British Columbia, Canada:

[ Academic Paper: https://bit.ly/34Atr6L ]

IMAGES:
Top: Southeast Asia and Australia during the last Ice Age.
Bottom: Estimations the areas in which Aboriginal groups congregated during the last Ice Age. (Source of both images - the above academic article)

Prehistoric civilisations - wiped out in the Younger Dryas?

An intriguing video on the evidence for much older civilisations that may have been wiped out in a global cataclysm some 12,900 years ago.

Video: human global migration throughout history

DNA shows rapid Aboriginal colonisation of E/W Australia

'Historic hair samples collected from Aboriginal people show that following an initial migration 50,000 years ago, populations spread rapidly around the east and west coasts of Australia.'

https://theconversation.com/dna-reveals-aboriginal-people-had-a-long-and-settled-connection-to-country-73958

Ancient trade between Tanzania and northern Australia ?

 

The five ancient coins, believed to have been minted in present-day Tanzania, date back to the 8th to 15th century AD. They were made of copper, silver, and gold and are thought to have been used as trade currency. The discovery of these coins on the remote and isolated Wessel Islands off the coast of Northern Territory in Australia has led to speculation that ancient East African traders may have reached the continent long before the arrival of Europeans.

The Kilwa Kisiwani with its ancient capital city located on the coast of present-day Tanzania in East Africa, was a powerful empire that controlled the trade of gold, ivory and other valuable goods from the African interior to the Indian Ocean.

The exact explanation for the presence of these coins remains a mystery, and further research and studies are needed to confirm their origin.

How did the five coins from distant Kilwa wind up in the isolated Wessel Islands? Was a shipwreck involved? Could it be that the Portuguese, who had looted Kilwa in 1505, reached the Australian shores with coins from East Africa in their possession? Or was it that Kilwan sailors, renowned as expert navigators all across the sea route between China and Africa, reached Australia? Did they trade with the Indigenous population? Or docked and left? Maybe some stayed.

https://www.facebook.com/AfricanAustralian/photos/a.10152788300699725/10160484585694725/

Ancient Aboriginal trade routes of Australia

 

https://www.odysseytraveller.com/articles/ancient-aboriginal-trade-routes-of-australia/

'As far back as 1939, archaeologists could show that Australia was criss-crossed by Aboriginal trade routes (see map, above, for more detail on these routes). For Isabel McBryde – ‘the mother of Australian archaeology’ – these Aboriginal trade networks were ‘among the world’s most extensive systems of human communication recorded in hunter-gatherer societies’...

'The extent of cultural exchange between Aboriginal groups is indicated by the widespread Panaramitee rock art style – also known as ‘track and circle’ – which is found across mainland Australia and Tasmania'...

'In 1974, the archaeologist Lesley Maynard studied engravings in Laura in Queensland, Mount Cameron West in Tasmania, and Ingaladdi in the Northern Territory, each of which she believed to be part of the Panaramitee style. The Tasmanian find was particularly important, indicating that the style developed before the creation of the Bass Strait by rising seas at the end of the Ice Age.

'This led her to develop a chronology of Australian rock art. The first was ancient ‘deep cave art’, produced in the last Ice Age; then the homogenous and widely distributed forms of the Panaramitee, also dating to the Pleistocene (Ice Age); and finally the regionally diverse styles of the Holocene (post-Ice Age), both ‘simple figurative styles’, and ‘complex figurative styles’, including the striking Wandjina of the Kimberley, and the intricate X-ray art found in Arnhem Land and Kakadu.'

Indonesian trade with northern Australian aborigines

 

article: https://www.australiaforeveryone.com.au/files/maritime-muslims.html

'Makassar people from the region of Sulawesi in Indonesia began visiting the coast of northern Australia sometime around the middle of the 18th century, first in the Kimberley region, and some decades later in Arnhem Land. They were men who collected and processed trepang (also known as sea cucumber), a marine invertebrate prized for its culinary value generally and for its supposed medicinal properties in Chinese markets. The term Makassan (or Macassan) is generally used to apply to all the trepangers who came to Australia.'
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makassan_contact_with_Australia