Made in Africa

Hominin Explorations and the Australian Skeletal Evidence

Steve Webb

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780128147993
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Made in Africa: Hominin Explorations and the Australian Skeletal Evidence describes and documents the largest collection of modern human remains in the world from its time period. These Australian fossils, which represent modern humans at the end of their great 20, 000 km journey from Africa, may be reburied in the next two years at the request of the Aboriginal community.

Part one of the book provides an overview of modern humans, their ancestors, and their journeys, explores the construct of human evolution over the last two and half million years, and defines the background to the first hominins and later modern humans to leave Africa, cross the world and meet other archaic peoples who had also travelled and undergone similar evolutionary pathways.

Part two focuses on Australia and the evidence for its earliest people. The Willandra Lakes fossils represent the earliest arrivals and are the largest and most diverse late Pleistocene collection from this part of the world. Although twenty to twenty-five thousand years younger than the oldest archaeological site in Australia, they exemplify the migrating end-point of the human story that reflect a diversity and culture not recorded elsewhere in the world.

Part three records the Willandra Lake Collection itself from a photographic and descriptive perspective.

Evolutionary biologists and geneticists will find this book to be a valuable documentation of the 20, 000 km hominid migration from Africa to the most distant parts of the world, and of the challenges and findings of the Willandra Lake Collection.

• Provides perspective for dispersal of the earliest hominins from Africa and the possible routes they took
• Describes both the evolutionary development and demographic exit of intermediate and modern humans from Africa and incorporates the final stages of modern human migrations
• Provides a full documentation of the Willandra Lakes skeletal collection and its place in developing a picture of the earliest as well as later Aboriginal Australians

Part I

The Longest Walk

• Chapter 1: A View from Kakadu
• Chapter 2: Ancestors of the Ancestors
• Chapter 3: Leaving Africa
• Chapter 4: AE3 and AE4: On the Road Again

Chapter 1

A View from Kakadu

Sets of 20,000 year old footprints in the Willandra, western New South Wales

Abstract

This chapter sets the scene for the earliest human arrivals in Australia by discussing the earliest art in northern Australia at Kakadu depicting our megafauna as a reflection of the early people. That includes my description of art that depicts a species of our extinct megafauna seemingly outlined on one of the art galleries to be found in the region. The chapter includes a description of the present environment and contrasts that with a picture of the environment 60–50,000 years ago under Ice Age conditions and reduced sea levels. It also describes possibilities for how the first movements of people into the continent took place and their direction of travel. There is an illustration of Aboriginal views from the region regarding how they began together with the altered geography of north Australia that once included Papua New Guinea.

Keywords

Ancestral spirits

Arnhem Land

art

first people

Ice Age

megafauna

palaeoenvironments

rock art

• Time Past
• Time Present
• The ‘Writing’ on the Wall!
• A Landing, but Where?
• A Landing: in Reality
• Moving On
• References

Time past

The truth is, of course, that my own people, the Riratjingu, are descended from the great Djankawu who came from the island Baralku far across the sea. Our spirits return to Baralku when we die. Djankawu came in his canoe with his two sisters, following the morning star which guided them to the shores of Yelangbara [Port Bradshaw] on the eastern coast of Arnhem Land. They walked far across the country following the rain clouds. When they wanted water they plunged their digging stick into the ground and fresh water flowed. From them we learnt the names of all the creatures on the land and they taught us all our law. (the words of the Son of Malawan from Yirrkylla, Northern Territory, in Isaacs [ed.] 1980:5, taken from Jacob, 1991:330) Namarrgon, the lightning man, like so many of the ‘First People’ entered the land on the northern coast. He was accompanied by his wife, Barrginj, and their children. They came with the rising sea levels, increasing rainfall and tropical storm activity. The very first place Namarrgon left some of his destructive essence was at Argalargal (Black Rock) on the Cobourg Peninsula. From there the family members made their way down the peninsula and then moved inland, looking for a good place to make their home. (after Chaloupka, 1993:56)

The northern boundary of Kakadu National Park fronts the Van Diemen Gulf on the southern edge of the Arafura Sea. The first people to land in Australia came across that sea and there are many Aboriginal Dreaming stories that relate it as those above do. Further east along the coast from Kakadu another Aboriginal Dreaming story describes those events that occurred in the ‘Dreaming’ time long ago. It describes when the ancestral Djanggawul sisters arrived from the island of Branko. That is the first of the two stories above. But if they were following the Morning Star, they were travelling west to east across the Arafura Sea looking at the early morning rising star. The story goes on to tell how ancestors landed on the East Arnhem Land coast near Yirrkala. Taking the form of Goanna lizards, they journeyed inland and jabbing their digging sticks into the ground they released fresh water. On they went, as they moved they created the land, then the people. Dreaming stories often relate how ancestral beings travelled the land and as they did so they gave the people their language, lore, dances, songs, ceremonies and rituals and taught them how to treat the land. The land then taught them what they needed to know to survive. If one reads between the lines it is not far off what could have been the experience of the first people as they floated from islands in the west and landed on this continue then continue their journey across it, long, long ago.

If we could time travel back at least 65,000 years ago, we could sit on a beach linking Australia to Papua New Guinea when the world was on average 10° cooler than it is today. Today that beach is covered by 40 m of sea. The exact date is not really important and nobody on the planet at that time knows what year it is or even thinks in those terms. There is no such thing as years months and days of the week in the minds of the world’s human inhabitants. The sun comes up and goes down, they can count those events and recognise regular changes in the environment that we call ‘seasons’, but that is all there is as a concept of time among humans living in the Ice Age before last.

The sea before us is calm and slowly undulating in a shallow swell. It might be the onset of an Ice Age but there is no ice. Instead, it is warm and humid. We are the only people on the beach and on this 10 million km² continent and nobody knows it even exists. Our beach stretches north to a place that one day will be called West Papua. A few creeks flow across the beach breaking the shoreline and a wide estuary half way along it drains overflow from a great lake half the size of the Caspian Sea to the east, Lake Carpentaria.

We are not completely alone; hours ago we saw a large animal way up the beach. They are a rarity. A giant lizard far bigger and longer than a Komodo Dragon is known to patrol the shore but they are not around today. There are giant salt water crocodiles, the oldest well over 100 years, that grow to more than 7 m. One could be patrolling the water in front of us. A distant thunderhead cloud punches into the sky signalling a tropical storm brewing over the western horizon. We stare at the sparkling sea that reflects the lowering afternoon sun and gaze towards the horizon. There is nothing to see but an eye-stinging glitter of the Sun on the water. It is a pivotal time in the story of Australia. We can now see a small craft away in the distance. Australia is about to receive its first humans that have made the first ocean crossing and complete a journey that began 20,000 km away in Africa.

Time present

I visited Kakadu National Park just before Christmas 2012. I had visited many times before but this time was special. Kakadu is Australia’s largest national park situated in the middle of a square-shaped block of land that pushes into the Arafura Sea. The area is known to Australians as the ‘Top End’ of the Northern Territory. I was there just before Christmas at the height of the Monsoon or ‘wet’ season, but ‘the wet’, as it is known up there, had not arrived. The climatic extremes at this time of the year are vitally important for rejuvenation, replenishment and nourishment of the special environment of the north Australian tropics. Aboriginal people know that Namargon the ancestral lightning spirit man is the one they have to thank for the ‘wet’. He brings it to the region providing renewal and growth for Arnhem Land’s bush food that will be used in the coming ‘dry’ or wintertime. The Monsoon develops over Southeast Asia and travels southeast on the south-east trade winds to the north Australian coast. It brings storms, torrential rains, thunder and lightning, the occasional vicious cyclone and the essence of life. The time before the monsoon arrives is called the ‘build-up’ when it was said that among the first white settlers in the region, as well as many that followed, suicides increased as the humidity and heat ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I: The Longest Walk
• Part II: People at the End of the World
• Part III: The Willandra Lake Collection: A Record
• Index