The first human settlements in Sahul

60,000 years ago, passing through the strait of Sunda, the first humans arrived to people the “Great Australia”. Probably they were small human groups that used some sort of boat, perhaps rafts made of logs and branches, that could even have had rudimentary sails.

Despite the reluctances of some authors to admit that humans would have developed some sort of boat which allowed them to overcome such distances in so early period of their history, it does not seem an improbable fact; 800,000 years ago the homo erectus, an ancestor with a much inferior brain capacity, achieved to sale 19 kilometers in open sea to populate the Flores island, between Bali and Timur in Indonesia)ⁱ. There exists, also, a well-nourished evidence that, in the Upper Pleistocene, the homo sapiens was expanding rapidly along insular Asia, and there have been found archaeological remains belonging to human settlements that date of in between 40,000 and 26,000 year ago (BP) in Tailand, Malasia, Indonesia and in the Philippinesⁱⁱ.(1998:37)

The ancestors of the Australian Aborigines that peopled the “Great Australia”, apparently divided into two groups, the first one, gave origin to the actual Australian Aborigines, occupied the southern part of the continent while the second ones, of which the actual Melanesian inhabitants of PNG descend, extend themselves to reach the northern margins and the west of the continent populating the place of Huon in Papua New Guinea 40,000 years ago approximately.

The old coast of Huon has its origin in the Pleistocene, about 120,000 years ago. Due to the massive movements of the earth's crust, to convulsion and volcanic eruptions, it gradually elevated, forming a gigantic ladder of enormous steps that reaches a height of 400 meters over the sea level. When the archaeologist Les Groubes and his pupils explored this natural formation, they found over one of the lower terraces, located at a height of 80 meters over sea level, 24 stone axes which form resembled a sand clock as it presented a central notch that served to adjust a handle. Two of them, next to a core shaped as horseshoe, were covered by a layer of volcanic ashes of two meters of thickness, and when they were dated using the method of thermo luminescence, it shed ages of between 37,000 and 45,000 years old before the present (AP), what turns them into one of the most ancient stone axes that there is knowledge of. These pieces prove that the concept of providing a handle to an instrument with the target of achieving more efficiency and precision is of great antiquity.

The discovery of another camp with campfires, that dates of the Pleistocene in the locality of Kosipe, in the interior of New Guinea, located at a height of 2,000 meter above the current sea level, demonstrates that human was exploring and harvesting berries of Pandanus.sp which grew in swaps situated in the interior of the island and in areas close by tops, that at that time were covered with snow. Here were also found stone axes with a similar shape, but with polished edges, what at the same time indicated a perfectionism in the technique of tool productionⁱⁱⁱ.

The excavations taken place in the caverns of calcium carbonate in the villages of Matemkupkum and Buang Marabak, similar to those which are object of study of our expedition, indicate that the archipelago of the Bismark, in the northern coast of New Guinea, was inhabited in between 35,000 and 32,000 years before of the present^iv while in the Salomon islands evidences were found about how 28,000 years ago man was already consuming tuber of taro, probably farmed o possibility harvested and selected afterwards with a certain care^v.

Apparently, these groups arrived successively, populating these vast uninhabited extensions. They were made up of a reduced number of individuals and lived, generally, isolated ones of the others, structured as small bands or groups of relatives. As a result of this isolation, geographical as well as temporal, they developed numerous different languages and this reflects in the fact that in this area of the world there exist a greater diversity of languages than in any other of the planet. All come from a ancestral language with Papua origin, that derived in an uncountable number of different languages unintelligible among them, grouped in at least twelve different linguistic families and which gave origin to the more than 750 languages that are spoken today in New Guinea, New Britain, and the island of Bougainville, to the northeast of the Salomon islands. The fragmentation of the languages is so big in this area, that some of them are only spoke by a few tens of family and even by groups compound by no more than 15 individuals.

The surviving strategies changed along with the period and the geographic places that were inhabited. The more ancient groups that peopled New Guinea found an extensive mega fauna, formed by diverse animals of great size, now extinct, like the Protemnodon, a kangaroo specie that could reach a weight of a thousand kilos, and the Dendrolagu, similar to the previous but of smaller size. There also existed the Diprodon, that was an herbivorous with similar size of a pig and a carnivorous similar to the extinct marsupial tiger of Tasmania^vi. There probably existed other representatives of this mega fauna so extended in Australia, but in New Guinea the investigations are scarce centered in the period of the Pleistocene. Nevertheless, today there are known 8 archaeological sites of that time with regard to which archaeologists have concluded that these groups of humans occupied preferentially the forest zones located at medium height were they had access to a great variety of nourishing resources; in some zones they extended also into the valleys that descended the mountains until they reached areas of less altitude^vii.

20,000 years ago those groups of hunter-gatherers were characterized by a great mobility and found themselves exploring the vast variety of marine and terrestrial resources. The majority of the seafood they consumed came from the fringe delimited by the extreme tides and the mangrove that covered this coastal areas and which offered a great variety of nourishment. They also feed from lizards and other reptiles, of some species of rodents, of diverse terrestrial birds and of some species of fruit-eating bats. At this period also the bones of a marsupial cuscus (Phalanger Orientalis) make their apparence among the leftovers of their nourishments, it the northern island of New Ireland. Since this marsupial is native to New Guinea and it did not exist in this area previously to this date, it not aventured to suppose that it was introduced deliberately by human being, who was raising it as a nourishing supplement.

About 18 thousand years ago the sea again rises its level flooding the plain of Arafura and forming in this way the Torres Strait, that finished separating the New Guinea Island of the Australian continent and therefore their human populations. The actual sea level was reached about 5 thousand years ago, before some other migratory groups of Austronesian speech arising out of Souther Estern Asiatic continent reached land in the area.

Table 1: Radio carbonic dates of the Lower Pleistocene of PNG

Bibliography:

ⁱ Morwood, M. 1. 1998, Nature, vo1.392, 12. march 1998 pag. 173-176
ⁱⁱFlood, Josephine, 1999, Archaeology ofthe Dreamtime. Angus & Robertson, Australia
ⁱⁱⁱ White, P. J., K, A. Crook and B. P. Ruxton, 1970 Kosice: a late Pleistocene site in the
Papuan New Guinea Highlands. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society , vol. 36, pp 15270.
^iv Wickler, S. And M. J. T. Spriggs 1998, Pleistocene human occupation ofthe Solomon
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^v Spriggs, M. 1993 Pleistocene agriculture in the Pacific: why not?, In Smith et al.
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^vi Mountain, M. 1. 1993 Hones hunting and predation in the Pleistocene in northem Sahul.
En Sahul in Review, Pleistocene Archaeology in Australia, New Guinea and Melanesia.
(M. A.Smith, M. Spriggs, and B. Frankhauser, editores. ). Ocasional Paper, Department
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^vii GoeffHope & Jack Golson 1995 Late Quatemary change in the mountains ofNew
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