Australia
The Arrival Of The Aborigines
More than 30.000 years ago the population of the world was small, and people lived in family groups, hunting, fishing and food gathering. There were no cultivated crops, animals were not herded for food and metalworking was yet to be discovered.
At that time, known as the last great Ice Age, Autralia was joined to New Guinea. Islands such as Java and Borneo were larger than today, sea passages between them narrower. This made it possible for the ancestors of the people now called Australian Aboriginals to reach Australia from land to the north.
It is not known from where the Aborigines began their journey, but it is certain that people with some kind of watercraft crossed the 100-160 kilometres stretches of water between the islands to the north, and reach the southern continent. This sea voyage is the earliest evidence of sea travel by prehistoric man.
As the ice flows of the Ice Age began to melt, the sea level rose, isolating Australia, and making the sea passages too wide for crossing by the simple form of watercraft available at the time. About 10.000 years ago, Tasmania became seperated from the main land, thus isolating the people there, and about 5.000 years ago the Australian continent took on the shape of that it has today.
Nobody knows how long the Aborigines took to reach Australia, or how they sattled the continent when they arrived. At present archaelogists are searching ancient camping sites for evidence of their history, and each new discovery provides links in the history of the thousands of years before white man reached the Great South Land. New discoveries also are changing previous ideas about the lenght of time that Aboriginals have been in australia, and modern scientific methods of dating have provided new possibilities for further research. It is certain that man reached Australia more than 40.000 years ago. Australia, once called "lost continent of prehistory", is fast losing that title.
