How did the indigenous get to Australia when the continents drifted apart much earlier?
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This needs to be asked in r/askscience because so many amateurs are weighing in with wrong information.
Why can’t we just assume they canoed from Melanesia? Aboriginal people are sooooo similar to Torres straight, PNG and even some Fijian people. (Although Fijian seem to be a mix between melanesian and polynesian genes)
Back then, the water level was much lower (tho not completely dry as many are implying)
The thought is that humans could’ve arrived via a short boat ride across from Indonesia.
There are very old aboriginal images of high prowed boats, in Australia. High prowed vessels are usually sea vessels.
Based on a really quick visual estimation of google earth I would say that you can get from main land Asia to Australia by going from island to island and no single journey between landmasses is much further than the 90 mile distance from America to Cuba. People came to america from Cuba on tiny make shift rafts. In fact you barely have to go more than 50 miles on any single voyage
So basically, island hopping
Northern Australia is very close to papua new ginea which is in turn close to the island chains of Indonesia/Malaysia which connects to mainland Asia
The saw way they got to Hawaii: Boats!
There’s legitimate emerging evidence that there may have been pacific islander groups who reached some regions of the America’s before North-East Asian groups who crossed the Bering Strait Land Bridge, so honestly, human expansion across the globe has happened by sea quite a bit, at least in that part of the world.
Hard to say if that’s an argument that humans in general are clever and good and exploring, or just that the pacific islanders in particular are absolutely hard-core, and have been since well before they became recognizable as who they are today.
To dumb it down as much as possible, they sailed. They absolutely did not walk, as paleoclimatology proves. The most interesting thing about Australian Archaeology is not only HOW indigenous Australians arrived in Sahul, but how they traversed the unique arid landscape and came to have some of their oldest remains found in the country’s most southern caves and rock formations ([https://www.jstor.org/stable/2155944](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2155944)). Their incredible hunting strategies utilising burning to draw animals out of dense grassland, then returning during the periods after when new blooms and growths drew in more small prey show that they were intelligent enough to plan food acquisition, and had the capability to plan for a voyage across a large body of water. (Bellwood, P.S., 2015. The global prehistory of human migration).
Post-graduate study of archaeology in Australia has a heavy emphasis on our history, not only because it is so incredibly fascinating, but also because so much of the indigenous population was killed or enslaved during the colonisation of Australia that we have to fight against our own government to recognise the traditional owners of the land.
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