How did the indigenous get to Australia when the continents drifted apart much earlier?
In: 4730
The sea level was much lower during the ice ages. There likely was a land bridge through indonesia, or possibly just short hops you could manage by small boats.
America was reached over the dry bering strait, Australia propably over the sunda strait that fell dry.
Look at Hawaii, look at Australia, which one do you think would be easier to get to for primitive peoples?
There are indigenous peoples on much harder places to get to than Australia, tiny boats and short trips combined with a shallower ocean would be the basic answer.
Continental drift occurs over millions of years, by contrast indigenous Australians arrived approximately 65,000 years ago, so the difference in land masses would have been negligible over that span of time.
As other posters have said, at the time sea levels were lower, and while there would have been land bridges connecting PNG to Australia and Java, Sumatra & Borneo to SE Asia, journey by boat would still have been necessary, although the journeys would have been shorter than those required today.
The continents have more or less been in their same place during the entire duration of humans have been on Earth. During ice ages though, the water levels were drastically lower. So shallow waters today could have been passable by people walking, and there could have been more islands in between major stops. That whole area north of Australia and into Indonesia would had much more land for people to cross.
[The short answer is that they walked.](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-30/research-into-ancient-aboriginal-migration-across-australia/100105902) 60,000 years ago the sea level was much lower, and there would have been a land bridge connecting the northern tip of Australia to south Asia.
Interestingly, but tangential to this as it occured 50,000 years later – there are Australian indigenous tribes with oral history that reach back before the last ice age. At this time sea level would have been at least 30 metres below it’s current level and large tracts of land to the north and south of Australia’s current coastlines would have been dry land. Very loosely, they tell of a time when there were open fields to hunt in the place that is now the Gulf of Carpentaria, and a time afterwards when “the tide came in but never went back out” which correlates with the end of the last ice age. Absolutely incredible to have such a accurate and unbroken oral history as to be able to literally recount the ages of the earth.
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/)
[https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010](https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010)
I feel like all we need is a couple boats to get lost in a storm and bam… people wash up on an island far from home.
I know there were land bridges too but maybe these people were also better nautical adventures than we give them credit for.
Australia isn’t really in the middle of nowhere. North of Australia there are a ton of little islands and land masses leading to mainland Asia (see Papa New Guinea, Indonesia. Malaysia, and everything else in between). Just go into Google Maps and really zoom in a lot. If some of those weren’t connected by land bridges, surely thy are reasonable boat distance.
Despite lower sea levels, as far as we know there was no land bridge between south-east Asia and Sahul (Australia and Papua) during the Pleistocene.Therefore by boat. Sahul would have been over the horizon from the nearest point (Timor), but bushfire smoke may have indicated the presence of land to coastal travellers coming from Asia.
Well… they had boats, and they could walk. Land bridges did exist between East Asia and Australia many thousands of years ago, and even when there wasn’t there’s evidence of skin boats being sewn some 60-75,000 years ago
A lot of people are saying land bridges but from what I have read it was more somewhere inbetween. The water was indeed shallower but there were still great stretches of sea and, remarkably, humans became expert seafarers and made their way to Australia and the other islands by boat. Eventually the seas rose and they could no longer make the trips back because the distance between the islands became much larger and more difficult.
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