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Australia's settlement by the Aborigines
http://theconversation.com/Alan WilliamsPhD candidate in Archaeology at Australian National University26 April 2013, 6.46am AEST
Australia’s colonisation was no accident, say the numbers
Like many people, I grew up believing Australia was colonised by a small band of people, who had most likely landed on its shores by accident; but research I published this week suggests a far larger founding population of between 1 000 and 3 000 people. Using statistical techniques to manipulate archaeological data, my paper, in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, explores the population history of Australia since colonisation 50 000 years ago to European contact in the 18th century. In so doing, it presents a new reconstruction of the prehistoric population of Australia.
At the heart of this analysis is a database of around 5 500 radiocarbon dates taken from archaeological sites across Australia; dates were taken from cooking pits (hearths), burials, middens, and other charcoal found in association with Aboriginal artefacts.
An Aboriginal midden.
(the white objects are shells and possibly fish and marsupial bones, the reddish objects are either stones or balls of clay which were used to cook the food. A fire was made on the stones or clay balls, then the charcoal and ashes were scooped out, the food put in on top of the hot stones, possibly with leaves or bark around, then covered and left to cook for several hours - Don )
Photo: © Michael L. Stevens
I inferred that these data directly correlated with population – so more data equals more people. There are a range of limitations and complexities around this issue, which are further explored in my paper. The two main techniques adopted included correcting the dataset for taphonomic loss (the loss of older sites due to weathering, erosion, destruction) and converting the radiocarbon data into an annual percentage record of population change over the 50,000 year period.
The results indicate that, following colonisation, populations did not expand and saturate the continent. Rather, populations remained low (less than 50 000 people) for some 40 000 years, before expanding in a series of “pulses” through the Holocene (the past 10 000 years). Despite correcting for taphonomic loss, these changes appear to remain, suggesting real change in the data, as opposed to losing older sites through other mechanisms. Two key points of interest came from this analysis:
1) during the Last Glacial Maximum (21-18 000 years ago), populations declined by as much as 60%. Put in modern-day terms, this equates to a loss of about 14 million people across Australia!
2) the population increase began much earlier in the Holocene than previously believed. In general, populations and a range of archaeological finds have always been considered to occur in tandem and in response to the onset of El Niño-Southern Oscillation intensification some 5 000 years ago.
El Niño-Southern Oscillation occurs when temperature variations of a band of water off the western coast of South America cause climate change across the Pacific, including Australia.
The data here suggests these changes may have occurred earlier and we may need to find another mechanism to explain them.
Going back to the startThe quantitative population estimates from the data have proved very interesting.Using the broad, ethnographically-observed indigenous population at the time of European contact, considered to be in the order of 700 000 to 1.2 million people (although some estimates are lower), I used the annual percentage growth rates and worked backwards towards a founding population.Despite using a range of techniques and colonisation dates, I found in general a founding population of 1 000-3 000 would be required to produce the observed populations.As I wrote at the outset, this finding suggests that the colonisation of Australia was not undertaken by a small band of people as previously thought, but perhaps a larger population on some form of deliberate exploration or migration.This number of people broadly compares with genetics data that suggests a larger population would have been needed to ensure viable populations over the past 50,000 years.Is this the last word on the size of Australia’s founding population? Probably not – but we may now be closer to the truth.
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My background
Some people have expressed interest in knowing a little bit about me. For those people, here is a potted biography:
I live in New South Wales, Australia, and I am a retired high school mathematics/science teacher.
The Donsmaps site is totally independent of any other influence. I work on it for my own pleasure, and finance it myself. I started before there was an internet, when I thought I could do a better job of the small map on the end papers of Jean Auel's wonderful book, Valley of the Horses, by adding detail and contour lines, and making a larger version. I have always loved maps since I was a young boy.
I had just bought a black and white '
fat Mac' with a whopping 512 kB of memory (!), and no hard disk. With a program called '
Super Paint' and a lot of double work (hand tracing first the maps of Europe from atlases, then scanning the images on the tracing paper, then merging the scanned images together, then tracing these digital scans on the computer screen), I made my own black and white map.
Then the internet came along, the terms of my internet access gave me space for a small website, and Don's Maps started. I got much better computers and software over the years, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for example, and my maps became colourised and had more detail. I did a lot of maps of the
travels of Ayla from Jean Auel's books, and I gradually included other pages with more and more photos available from the web, and scanned from books or from scientific papers, since I was not happy with the quality generally available. I became very interested in the Venus figurines, and set out to make a
complete record of the ice age ones. Along the way I got interested in archaeology for its own sake.
In 2008 my wife and I went to Europe, and when we arrived in Frankfurt at sunrise after the 24 hour plane trip from Sydney, while my wife left on her own tour with her sister, they visited relatives in Germany and Austria, I went off by myself on the train to Paris. Later that afternoon I took a train to Brive-la-Gaillarde, found a hotel and caught up on lost sleep. The next morning I hired a car, and over the next four weeks visited and photographed many of the original archaeological sites in the south of France, as well as many archaeological museums. It was a wonderful experience.My wife and I met up again later in the Black Forest, and
cycled down the Danube from its source to Budapest, camping most of the way, a wonderful trip, collecting many photos, including a visit to
Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic, as well as visiting the Vienna natural history museum. Jean Auel fans will realise the significance of that trip!
Luckily I speak French, the trips to France would have been difficult or impossible otherwise. No one outside large cities speaks English (or they refuse to). I was travelling independently, not as part of a tour group. I never knew where I was going to be the next night, and I camped nearly everywhere, except for large cities. I am a very experienced bushwalker (hiker) and have the required equipment -
a one-man ultra lightweight tent, sleeping bag, stove, raincoat, and so on, all of which I make myself for use here when I go bushwalking, especially down the beautiful gorges east of Armidale, though for Europe I use a commercial two person lightweight tent, since weight is not so much of a problem when cycling or using a car, and in any case my wife was with me when cycling, once along the Donau from its source to Budapest in 2008, and again from Amsterdam to Copenhagen and then up the Rhine from Köln to the Black Forest in 2014, both of which were memorable and wonderful trips.
In 2012 we went to Canada for a wedding and to visit old friends, and I took the opportunity to visit the wonderful Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, where I took many photographs of the items on exhibit, particularly of the superb display of artefacts of the
First Nations of the Pacific Northwest.
In 2014 my wife and I did another European cycling tour, from
Amsterdam to Copenhagen, then from Cologne up the Rhine to the Black Forest, camping most of the way in each case, and taking many useful photos in museums along the way, including the museums at Leiden, Netherlands, and
Roskilde in Denmark, and the National Museum in Copenhagen. Again, I later hired a car and did more photography and visited many more sites in France.
In 2015 I made a lone visit to all the major museums in western Europe by public transport, mostly by train, and that went very well. I had learned a lot of German while travelling with my wife, who is a fluent speaker of the language, and of all the European countries, Germany is my favourite. I feel comfortable there. I love the people, the food, and the beer. Germans are gemütlich, I have many friends there now.
I repeated the visit to western Europe in 2018, to fill in some gaps of museums I had not visited the first time, because they were either closed for renovation the first time (such as the Musée de l'Homme in Paris) or because I ran out of time, or because I wanted to fill in some gaps from major museums such as the British Museum, the Berlin Museum, München, the Louvre, the Petrie and Natural History Museums in London, the Vienna Natural History Museum, the important museum in Brno, and museums in northern Germany. It takes at least two visits, preferably three, to thoroughly explore the items on display in a major museum.
I spend a lot of time on the site, typically at least a few hours a day, often more. I do a lot of translation of original papers not available in English, a time consuming but I believe a valuable task. People and fate have been very generous to me, and it is good to give back a very small part of what I have been given. With the help of online translation apps and use of online dictionaries there are few languages I cannot translate, though I find Czech a challenge!
Life has been kind to me, I want for nothing, and am in good health. Not many in the world are as lucky as I am, and I am grateful for my good fortune.
My best wishes to all who read and enjoy the pages of my site.
May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
And may rain on a tin roof lull you to sleep at night.
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Website last updated Monday 10 March 2025