Session 3.1: The first colonisation of Australia in narratives of modern human evolution

1. The first colonisation of Australia in narratives of modern human evolution

Iain Davidson
University of New England

The first colonisation of Australia at some time between 40ka and 60ka is seen by many authors as a landmark event in the evolution of human behaviour. The first inhabitants were fully modern people, they made relatively long sea-crossings and among the earliest artefacts are indications of the use of ochre and personal ornamentation. Fully modern people appear later in Europe, archaeological evidence for such early sea-crossings of any sort are rare in other parts of the world. But ochre use is most abundant in Africa, and may be part of a broader change in the importance of symbols.

In this presentation, I will review the argument put by Davidson and Noble (Davidson & Noble 1992), and the challenge it presented to the Eurocentric narrative of the emergence of modern human behaviour. Then I will consider how the claim for the importance of the first colonisation of Australia itself has become a narrative that drives interpretation of other events in the remote past.

2. The origins of modern cognition and behaviour: An African perspective

Nicola Stern
La Trobe University

For more than twenty years it has been known that modern humans were established in sub-Saharan Africa and South West Asia millennia before the appearance of archaeological traces long-believed to represent modern cognitive abilities and modern patterns of behaviour. This observation raises many questions about the behavioural information embedded in the Pleistocene archaeological record so it is not surprising that the response to this apparent conundrum has been varied. At present there is considerable interest Klein’s suggestion that modern humans are the outcome of two evolutionary events: a speciation event in sub-Saharan Africa that produced modern human form and a second evolutionary event that also took place in sub-Saharan Africa circa 50 ka, which established the capacity for modern cognition and behaviour. Of course, this is not the only interpretive possibility, but attempts to discriminate between alternative readings of the African archaeological record are hampered by a lack of fundamental data needed to describe the pattern of change that occurred and to investigate its behavioural and evolutionary significance.

3. Getting 'Out of Africa'—sea crossings, land crossings and culture in the hominid migrations

Robin Derricourt
Visiting Fellow, School of History, University of New South Wales

This paper summarises some conclusions from a review of sea crossings out of Africa. Arguably, what is needed primarily to get hominids from place to place is not strong legs or usable watercraft but appropriate culture. This paper considers the issue of human maritime crossings by re-examining the evidence for movements out of the African continent. Palaeoanthropologists sometimes blur over the cultural issues in transferring hominid genes across ecological barriers. Archaeology can use the broader sweep of cultural history to define possibilities and probabilities more narrowly.

Application of Occam’s razor—the preference for simple and singular explanations over complex and multiple—narrows the explanatory range for human expansion from Africa. The relatively recent evidence of human movement from the African continent to offshore islands indicates we should be cautious in assuming seaborne movements from earlier hominids to adjacent landmasses. The archaeological evidence for before modern humans does not require water-borne passages out of Africa; it does not require—and to some extent challenges—the likelihood of pre-modern movements to Europe or Asia from the African landmass. The evidence seems consistent with populations movements restricted to specific parts of the Sinai land bridge during specific episodes in the aridity cycle of north-east Africa.

4. The 'no-crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar before the late Upper Paleolithic' paradigm: Time for change?

Miguel Caparros
Institut de Paléontologie Humaine, Département de Préhistoire, Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, France

While humans could sail to Flores, colonize Australia 60,000 years ago and engage in exploring Japan and Crete by seafaring in the Upper Paleolithic, it is commonly accepted that the Strait of Gibraltar represented a major geographical barrier which prevented human cultural exchanges between Iberia and North Africa until the late Upper Paleolithic. Although several islands emerge between Spain and Morocco at lower sea levels during glacial periods, resulting in a distance of at most 3 miles between these islands and both coasts, it is generally argued that strong currents made the crossing impossible. We present here some phenetic evidence showing the existence of a neanderthalensis gradient linking the Iberian Neandertals and pre-Neandertals to Western Asian Neandertals. Although no classical Neandertal remains have been found in North Africa it would appear that the most parsimonious route to link these two hominid groups would be through North Africa. This hypothesis raises the question of the allochtonous or autochtonous origin of the widely distributed North African Mousterian culture given the similarities that exists with European faciès. We review other modern cultural, anthropological and population genetic evidence, and conclude that today the persistence of this paradigm is unsustainable and damaging to the study and understanding of modern human origins.

5. To bead or not to bead

Jane Balme and Kate Morse
University of Western Australia

Beads are a form of decorative symbolic behaviour expressing individual or group identity. Although rare, they have been found in association with the earliest modern people in most parts of the world including Australia. Beads from four sites in Western Australia indicate the widespread existence of bead making during the Pleistocene. The evident selection of raw material, transportation and manufacturing techniques associated with the beads contributes to arguments for the presence of long range networks and the importance of beads as social markers in the early human occupation of Australia.

6. Picturing prehistory: The visual colonisation of Australian, Oceanic and North American peopling narratives

Sara Elizabeth Perry
Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria, Canada

Critical attention to the power and seductive appeal of scientific imagery has done little to disrupt the archaeological tradition of saturating academic and popular literature with supposedly objective, self-evident pictures. The ideologically loaded nature of such renderings, however, is blatant in archaeological depictions of the first human colonisations of North America, Australia and Oceania wherein seemingly innocent visual representations evoke prehistoric nationalisms and citizenships, and, in so doing, promote the timeless legitimacy and dominance of the West. The archaeological impulse to make sense of phenomena such as Clovis and the ‘ice-free corridor’ (North America), Lake Mungo (Australia), and the rapid settlement of the remote Pacific has led to authoritative pictorial reconstructions of first peopling events which tend—dubiously—to reflect the status quo. This presentation endeavours to deconstruct peopling imagery as a means towards exposing how these visual ‘artefacts’ have slipped easily into commonsense ratifications of Western hegemony. Pandering to cowboy mentalities, to stereotypes of Otherness and exoticism, and to contemporary geographical and socio-political borders, archaeological picturing practices have trivialised landmark events such as the first colonisation of Australia, eclipsing them behind scientifically-sanctioned narratives which enable Euro-Americans to unassumingly locate (sight/site/cite) themselves in the archaeological record of prehistory.