ARCA2020 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Negrito, Ethnography, Thylacine
30 Jul 2018
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Lecture 1: australia colonised only 200 years ago, prior to this, it was the driest continent on earth, inhabited by hunter-gatherers (farmers in. There was no three-age sequence- aborigines were compared to "primitive hominins," which were racist evolutionary views: huge ethnographic record- help or hindrance (tyranny of ethnography), pleistocene vs holocene. How did people arrive in australia: people came from sub-saharan african populations 60-80,000 years ago, but we don"t know how exactly they made it here. 65,000 years ago, sea levels were dropping rapidly, meaning the continental shelf of australia was at its maximum extent, so crossing between islands was much easier (wallacea). There is no evidence of aboriginal people being in this area before approx. Some paintings may depict megafauna that were thought to have reached extinction earlier, however we do not know for sure what was being depicted- they could be distorted versions of living animals or mythical creatures.
