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The Pleistocene Colonization of Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

D. J. Mulvaney
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Extract

The Australian continent was peopled during the Pleistocene epoch. Positive evidence for this migration is lately emerging from that limbo known to archaeologists as (suspense account', a void into which many oddments have been shot over the years. Probably the most exotic claims were coincident with Dubois' revelation of Pithecanthropus in Java, when Australian optimists exhibited casts of the imprints left by (human' feet and buttocks, in allegedly Pliocene dune limestone from Victoria. This prompted Otto Schoetensach, progenitor of Homo heidelbergensis, to pronounce Australia as the probable focus of human evolution; both he and H. Klaatsch saw, in aboriginal techniques of tree-climbing, direct vestiges of arboreal ancestry [I].

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Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 38 , Issue 152 , December 1964, pp. 263 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1964

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References

[1] Mulvaney, D. J., ‘The Australian Aborigines 1606–1920: opinion and fieldwork’, Historical Studies-Australia and New Zealand, 8, 1958, 304 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for discussion and documentation.

[2] Smyth, R. B., The Aborigines of Victoria (1878), 1, 364 Google Scholar; Etheridge, R., ‘Has Man a geological history in Australia?’, Proc. Linnaean SOC. N.S.W., 5, 1891 Google Scholar; Gregory, J. W., ‘The Antiquity of Man in Victoria’, Proc. Ray. SOC. Vic., 17, 1904 Google Scholar.

[3] Howitt, A. W., The Native Tribes of South- East Australia (London, 1904)Google Scholar, ch. 1.

[4] Casey, D. A., Proc. Third Congress Prehistorians of the Far East (Singapore), 25 Google Scholar; the evidence for the various claims is also discussed by Mahony, D. J., ‘The problem of the antiquity of man in Australia’, Mem. National Mus. Vic., 13, 1943 Google Scholar.

[5] N. B. Tindale, Rec. S. Aus. Mus., 6, 1937; Aust. J. Sci., 3, 1941.

[6] P.P.S., 27, 1961, 66–71 Google Scholar.

[7] antiquity, 1963, 298.

[8] Oceania, 33, 1962, 136–8 Google ScholarPubMed.

[9] See D. J. Mulvaney, ‘Australian Radiocarbon dates’, antiquity, 961, 37–9; to which should be added ‘NPL 63, 1500 ± 90 b.c., a date for a microlith at From’s Landing, shelter 6’ (in press).

[10] Rec. S. Am. Mu., 14, 1961, 193–6 Google Scholar.

[11] antiquity, 1954, 110–13.

[12] P.P.S. 27, 1961,64 Google ScholarPubMed.

[13] R. W. Fairbridge, ‘The changing level of the sea’, Scientific American, May 1960; Cotton, C. A., ‘Low sea levels in the late Pleistocene’, Trans. Roy. Soc. N.Z. Geology, 1, 1962, 250 Google Scholar.

[14] Brothwell, D. R. in Sarawak Mus. Jour., IX, 1961.Google Scholar It is unfortunate that use was made of unreliable measurements for the Keilor and Talgai crania.

[15] Dates quoted in Gill, E. D., Aust. J. Sci,, 18, 1955 49–52Google Scholar.

[16] Hydriotaphia, Ume-Burial1 (1658).