Re: Wet & Dry Sand - Papers

From: Ross Macfarlane (rmacfarl_at_alphalink.com.au)
Date: 09/24/04 

Date: 24 Sep 2004 00:57:40 -0700

richardparker01@yahoo.com (richard01) wrote in message news:<6e30eb22.0409230530.2248884f@posting.google.com>...
...
>
> I think, if we looked, we'd find little evidence of a 'land bridge'
> between Australia and Tasmania, but there has never been any
> suggestion that even modern aborigines used boats much.

Sorry Richard. I must be misreading you. Surely you're not suggesting
that there was no land bridge between Australia & Tasmania? Sea depths
& continental plate locations are knowns in the modern world, and
there is abundant evidence that there was a land bridge between the
Australian mainland & Tasmania until about 12KYA, which there never
was between Australia & Asia.

Check figure 5.2 in this link:
http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/humanities/abtorres/52246/study/chap5.htm

As re Aborigines using boats, this is a pretty meaningless judgement,
because it's very culturally driven. They weren't used much by desert
aborigines, but they were & are very much a part of life for Torres
Strait Islanders & coastal Papuans. Bark canoes were used widely along
major waterways such as the Murray-Darling system - relatively low
tech perhaps (matter of opinion :-) but why would they need an
outrigger sailing boat to cross a 500-metre wide waterway?

There are plenty of human cultural precendents for loss of
technologies that were no longer appropriate. We don't know what level
of technology the boats were used by the first Australian colonists
40-60KYA, but they had to be capable of crossing the Sunda Strait
safely (about 60Km of open water from memory). Not so for crossing
Bass Strait when there wasn't one...

Ross Macfarlane

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