Timeline very early Australian history

1. Timeline Australian Very early history

2. The map shows the probable extent of land and water at the time of the last glacial maximum and when the sea level was probably more than 150 m lower than today; it illustrates the formidable sea obstacle that migrants would have faced.

3. It is believed that early human migration to Australia was achieved when it formed part of the Sahul continent, connected to the island of New Guinea via a land bridge. This would have nevertheless required crossing the sea at the so-called Wallace Line. It is also possible that people came by island- hopping via an island chain between Sulawesi and New Guinea, reaching North Western Australia via Timor. Madjedbebe is the oldest known site showing the presence of humans in Australia. Archaeological excavations conducted by Clarkson et al. (2017) yielded evidence to suggest that Madjedbebe was first occupied by humans possibly by 65,000 +/- 6,000 years ago and at least by 50,000 years ago. While the age of 50,000 years ago has been widely accepted since the 1990s, this latter estimate (of ca. 65,000 years ago) has, as of 2017, been questioned by some experts. The date sets the minimum age for the arrival of humans in Australia, and by extension for the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa. More than 100,000 artefacts have been excavated (including >10,000 artefacts from the lowest dense occupation layer termed 'Phase 2'), including flaked stone artefacts, ground stone axe heads, grinding stones, animal bones, shellfish remains, ground ochre, charcoal, seeds and human burials. Some of these were buried more than 2.5 metres below the surface.

4. The Sahul Shelf and the Sunda Shelf today. The area in between is called "Wallacea“ Sundaland (also called Sundaica or the Sundaic region) is a biogeographical region of South-eastern Asia corresponding to a larger landmass that was exposed throughout the last 2.6 million years during periods when sea levels were lower. It includes Bali, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra in Indonesia, and their surrounding small islands, as well as the Malay Peninsula on the Asian mainland.

5. The prehistory of Australia is the period between the first human habitation of the Australian continent and the colonisation of Australia in 1788, which marks the start of consistent written documentation of Australia. This period has been variously estimated, with most evidence suggesting that it goes back between 50,000 and 65,000 years. This era is referred as prehistory rather than history because knowledge of this time period does not derive from written documentation. However, some argue that Indigenous oral tradition should be accorded an equal status. A hunter-gatherer lifestyle was dominant until the arrival of Europeans, although there is evidence of land management by practices such as cultural burning, and in some areas, agriculture, fish farming, and permanent settlements. The earliest evidence of humans in Australia has been variously estimated, with most agreement as of 2018 that it dates from between 50,000 and 65,000 years BP

6. 40,000–30,000 years ago: First human settlements formed by Aboriginal Australians in several areas that are today the cities of Sydney, Perth and Melbourne. 40,000–20,000 years ago: oldest known ritual cremation, the Mungo Lady, in Lake Mungo, Australia. 26 000 Bread is made In Cuddie Springs NSW 80,000–40,000: Evidence of Australian Aboriginal Culture. Tasmania 40 000

7. 6 000 18 000 All regions in Australia are Inhabited by Indigenous people Rising sea levels isolate Papua New Guinea Forming the Torres Strait Island 11 000 Tasmania now Isolatde by By rising sea levels 3 000 1606 Climate changes to the same as today First contact Europeans

9. Lake Mungo have been deposited over more than 100,000 years. and soil forming the Walls around the edge of the lake. The oldest is the reddish Gol Gol layer, formed between 100,000 and 120,000 years ago 100,000 and 120,000 years ago. The middle greyish layer is the Mungo layer, deposited between 50,000 and 25,000 years ago 50,000 and 25,000 years ago. The most recent is the pale brown Zanci layer, which was laid down mostly between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago 25,000 and 15,000 years ago. 100,000 years. There are three distinct layers of sands The Mungo layer, which was deposited before the last glacial period, is archaeologically the richest. Although this layer corresponds with a time of low rainfall and cooler weather, more rainwater ran off the western side of the Great Dividing Range during that period, keeping the lake full and teeming with fish and waterbirds. It supported a significant human population and had abundant resources, as well as many varieties of Australian megafauna. During the last ice age period, the water level in the lake fell, and it became a salt lake. This made the soil alkaline, which helped to preserve the remains left behind.

10. Lake Mungo remains The Lake Mungo remains are three prominent sets of human remains that are possibly Aboriginal Australian: Lake Mungo 1 (also called Mungo Woman, LM1, and ANU-618), Lake Mungo 3 (also called Mungo Man, Lake Mungo III, and LM3), and Lake Mungo 2 (LM2). Lake Mungo is in New South Wales, Australia, specifically the World Heritage listed Willandra Lakes Region. Mungo woman (LM1) was discovered in 1969 and is one of the world's oldest known cremations. The remains designated Mungo man (LM3) were discovered in 1974, and are dated to around 40,000 years old, the Pleistocene epoch, and are the oldest Homo sapiens (human) remains found on the Australian continent. 41 000 B C Lake Mungo is a dry lake located in south-eastern Australia, in the south-western portion of New South Wales. It is about 760 kilometres (470 mi) due west of Sydney and 90 kilometres (56 mi) north-east of Mildura, and 110 kilometres north-west of Balranald. The lake is the central feature of Mungo National Park.

11. LM1 (red) LM3 (blue) The white line shows the eastern shore of the lake, the sand dune, or lunette, where most archaeological material has been found Landsat 7 imagery of Lake Mungo. The white line defining the eastern shore of the lake is the sand dune, or lunette, where most archaeological material has been found

12. LM1 was discovered in 1969 the Willandra Lakes Region by Jim Bowler with the University of Melbourne. LM1 has been 14C dated at 24,700 to 19,030 years ago. A date of 26,250 ±1120 BP was achieved with charcoal from a hearth 15 cm above the burial. Preservation of the remains is poor. Very limited detailed information was published before the bones were unconditionally repatriated to the Indigenous people of Australia in 1992 1992. A lack of a detailed description of the remains along with a limited distribution of casts with no access to the original material makes it difficult to assess the published material. 1969 at The reconstruction and description were mainly done by Alan Thorne at the Australian National University. LM1 was an early human inhabitant of the continent of Australia. Her remains are one of the oldest sets of anatomically modern human remains found in Australia. It represents one of the world's oldest known cremations. The finding implies that complicated burial rituals existed in early human societies.

13. The bones were unconditionally repatriated in 1992 Traditional Tribal Groups (3TTG), consisting of the Paakantji, the Muthi Muthi, and the Ngiyampaa. LM1 had become a symbol of the long Aboriginal occupation in Australia, and an important icon for both archaeologists and indigenous Australians. LM1 is now in a locked vault at the Mungo National Park exhibition centre. The vault has a double lock and can be opened only if two keys are used. One key is controlled by archaeologists, the other by the local indigenous peoples. in 1992 to the traditional owners, an alliance called the Three In late 2013 In late 2013, the NSW government, dismissed all management structures, leaving nothing in place to own or care for the remains. A new plan of management was delivered by a consultancy in early 2014 there was no one to implement it. early 2014, but On 24 May 2022 On 24 May 2022 Mungo Lady and Mungo Man were reburied. In a statement, Heritage NSW, which had custody of the remains, said the state government “did not authorise, conduct, or endorse the removal and subsequent burial of any remains on 24 May”. Mungo National Park can be visited by tourists and is accessed by an unsealed road. Boardwalks have been installed throughout the sand dunes and visitors are forbidden from stepping off the boardwalks unless accompanied by an Aboriginal guide. In 2014, In 2014, fake bones were buried throughout the area as part of an experiment for La Trobe University. Within two weeks, nearly all of the artificial bones had disappeared.

14. Estimates of the number of people living in Australia at the time that colonisation began in 1788, who belonged to a range of diverse groups, vary from 300,000 to a million, and upper estimates place the total population as high as 1.25 million. A cumulative population of 1.6 billion people has been estimated to have lived in Australia over 65,000 years prior to British colonisation. The regions of heaviest Aboriginal population were the same temperate coastal regions that are currently the most heavily populated, the Murray River valley in particular. In the early 1900s it was commonly believed that the Aboriginal population of Australia was heading toward extinction. The population shrank from those present when colonisation began in New South Wales in 1788, to 50,000 in 1930. This drastic reduction in numbers has been attributed to outbreaks of smallpox and other diseases, but other sources have described the extent of frontier clashes and in some cases, deliberate killings of Aboriginal peoples.

15. The rock shelter for which Indian Cave State Park is named.

16. The rock shelters at Madjedbebe (about 50 kilometres (31 mi) inland from the present coast) and at Nauwalabila I (70 kilometres (43 mi) further south) show evidence of used pieces of ochre used by artists 60,000 years ago. Near Penrith, stone tools have been found in Cranebrook Terraces gravel sediments having dates of 45,000 to 50,000 years BP. In 1999 Charles Dortch dated chert and calcrete flake stone tools found on Rottnest Island, Western Australia, at 70,000 years BP. A 2018 study using archaeobotany dated evidence of human habitation at Karnatukul (Serpent's Glen) in the Carnarvon Range in the Little Sandy Desert in WA at around 50,000 years, which was 20,000 earlier than previously believed. There is also evidence of a change in fire régimes in Australia, drawn from reef deposits in Queensland, between 70 and 100,000 years ago, and the integration of human genomic evidence from various parts of the world also supports a date of before 60,000 years for the arrival of Australian Aboriginal people in the continent.[

17. The Great Sandy Desert is an interim Australian bioregion, located in the northeast of Western Australia straddling the Pilbara and southern Kimberley regions and extending east into the Northern Territory. It is the second largest desert in Australia after the Great Victoria Desert and encompasses an area of 284,993 square kilometres (110,036 sq mi). The Gibson Desert lies to the south and the Tanami Desert lies to the east of the Great Sandy Desert. The Carnegie expedition of 1896 was led by David Carnegie. It covered territory in the centre of Western Australia, including the Gibson and Great Sandy Deserts. The expedition was funded by Carnegie, who proposed to travel over 2,000 km (1,200 mi) from Coolgardie to Halls Creek. Much of the area was unexplored and unmapped, so Carnegie hoped to find good pastoral or gold-bearing land and make a name for himself as an explorer. The party left Coolgardie on 9 July 1896. They traveled north to Menzies, then northeast. On 23 July they entered the largely unexplored country and were immediately affected by the extreme scarcity of water.

18. Humans reached Tasmania approximately 40,000 years ago by migrating across a land bridge from the mainland that existed during the last glacial maximum. After the seas rose about 12,000 years ago and covered the land bridge, the inhabitants there were isolated from the mainland until the arrival of European settlers. Short-statured Aboriginal tribes inhabited the rainforests of North Queensland, of which the best known group is probably the Tjapukai of the Cairns area. These rainforest people, collectively referred to as Barrineans, were once considered to be a relic of an earlier wave of Negrito migration to the Australian continent, but this "Aboriginal pygmy" theory has been discredited. Mungo Man, found near Lake Mungo in New South Wales, is the oldest human yet found in Australia. Although the exact age of Mungo Man is in dispute, the best consensus is that he is at least 40,000 years old. Stone tools also found at Lake Mungo have been estimated, based on stratigraphic association, to be about 50,000 years old. Since Lake Mungo is in south-eastern Australia, many archaeologists have concluded that humans must have arrived in north-west Australia at least several thousand years earlier. 40 000 ears ago - Tasmania

19. According to one study, Australo-Papuans (such as the indigenous people of New Guinea and Aboriginal Australians) could have either formed from a mixture between an East Eurasian lineage and lineage basal to West and East Asians, or as a sister lineage of East Asians with or without a minor basal OoA or xOoA contribution. PCA calculated on present-day and ancient individuals from eastern Eurasia and Oceania. PC1 (23,8%) distinguish East- Eurasians and Australo- Melanesians, while PC2 (6,3%) differentiates East-Eurasians along a North to South cline.

20. Strait Islander Strait Islander peopl people e

21. Trading canoe at Erub Trading canoe at Erub (Darnley Island), c. (Darnley Island), c. 1849 1849 The Torres Strait Islands are a group of at least 274 small islands in the Torres Strait, a waterway separating far northern continental Australia's Cape York Peninsula and the island of New Guinea. They span an area of 48,000 km2 (19,000 sq mi), but their total land area is 566 km2 (219 sq mi). The Islands have been inhabited by the indigenous Torres Strait Islanders. Lieutenant James Cook first claimed British sovereignty over the eastern part of Australia at Possession Island in 1770, but British administrative control only began in the Torres Strait Islands in 1862.

22. The islands are now mostly part of Queensland, a constituent State of the Commonwealth of Australia, but are administered by the Torres Strait Regional Authority, a statutory authority of the Australian federal government. A few islands very close to the coast of mainland New Guinea belong to the Western Province of Papua New Guinea, most importantly Daru Island with the provincial capital, Daru. Only 16 of the islands are inhabited. The Torres Strait Islands' population was recorded at 4,514 in the 2016 Australian census, with 91.8% of these identifying as Indigenous Torres Strait Island peoples. Although counted as Indigenous Australians, Torres Strait Islander peoples, being predominantly Melanesian, are ethnically and culturally different from Aboriginal Australians. There was continuous inter-island warfare. In particular, the Murray (Mer) islanders were known as the fiercest raiders and head-hunters. They waged constant warfare against the Darnley islanders, their nearest neighbours. The Portuguese navigator Luís Vaez de Torres explored the Torres Strait in 1606. Torres had joined the expedition of Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, which sailed west from Peru across the Pacific Ocean in search of Terra Australis. Captain James Cook first claimed British sovereignty in 1770 over the eastern part of Australia at Possession Island. British administrative control did not begin until 1862 in the Torres Strait Islands, marked by the appointment of John Jardine, police magistrate at Rockhampton, as Government Resident in the Torres Straits.

23. Captain Cook raises the Union Flag on Possession Island, 22 August 1770 In 1770 the British navigator Lieutenant James Cook sailed northward along the east coast of Australia in the Endeavour, anchoring for a week at Botany Bay. Three months later, at Possession Island in Queensland, he claimed possession of the entire east coast he had explored for Britain.

24. In 1872, the boundary of Queensland was extended to include Thursday Island and other islands in Torres Strait within 60 miles of the Queensland coast. In June 1875, a measles epidemic killed about 25% of the population, with some islands suffering losses of up to 80%, as the islanders had no natural immunity to European diseases. In 1879, Queensland annexed the other Torres Strait Islands. They were classified as part of the British colony of Queensland and, after 1901, of the Australian state of Queensland. But some of them lie just off the coast of New Guinea. In 1885, John Douglas was appointed as Government Resident Magistrate residing on Thursday Island. He made periodic tours of all the islands and was known to all the natives. He established the system under which the hereditary native chief of each island was installed as chief magistrate, supporting the local traditional system. He also established Native Police, but the only island on which the Native Police were armed was Saibai. There they were provided with Snider carbines to repel the attacks of the Marind-anim (formerly known as Tugeri), the headhunters who raided the islands from their territory on the New Guinea coast. In 1898–1899, the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition led by Alfred Cort Haddon visited the Torres Strait Islands. Among its members was W. H. R. Rivers, who later gained notability for his work in psychology and treating officers in the Great War. They collected and took about 2000 cultural artefacts, ostensibly to save them from destruction by missionaries. But all of the artefacts collected by Samuel Macfarlane were sold in London, mostly to European museums. In 1904, the peoples of the Torres Strait Islands were made subject to the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, which gave draconian powers to the Queensland government in placing legal restrictions on natives and on their land use.

25. In 1899, John Douglas had initiated a process of electing island councils, intended to loosen the power of missionaries in the islands. They had become powerful by default because the government did not have resources to administer the territory. In the Western islands, where the traditional lifestyle was semi- nomadic, the council system continued to thrive. During World War II, many Torres Strait Islander people served in the Torres Strait Light Infantry Battalion of the Australian Army.[citation needed] From 1960 to 1973, Margaret Lawrie captured some of the Torres Strait Islander people's culture by recording their recounting of local myths and legends. Her anthropological work, stored at the State Library of Queensland, has recently been recognised and registered with the Australian UNESCO Memory of the World Programme. The proximity of the islands to Papua New Guinea became an issue when the territory started moving to gain independence from Australia, which it gained in 1975. The Papua New Guinea government objected to the position of the border close to the New Guinean mainland, and the subsequent complete control that Australia exercised over the waters of the strait. The Torres Strait Islanders opposed being separated from Australia and insisted on no change to the border. The Australian Federal government wished to cede the northern islands to appease Papua New Guinea, but were opposed by the Queensland government and Queensland Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

26. An agreement was struck in 1978 whereby the islands and their inhabitants remained Australian, but the maritime boundary between Australia and Papua New Guinea was defined as running through the centre of the strait. In practice the two countries co-operate closely in the management of the strait's resources. In 1982, Eddie Mabo and four other Torres Strait Islander people from Mer (Murray Island) started legal proceedings to establish their traditional land ownership. Because Mabo was the first-named plaintiff, it became known as the Mabo Case. In 1992, after ten years of hearings before the Queensland Supreme Court and the High Court of Australia, the latter court found that the Mer people had owned their land prior to annexation by Queensland. This ruling overturned the long-established legal doctrine of terra nullius ("no-one's land"), which held that native title over Crown land in Australia had been extinguished at the time of annexation. The ruling thus has had far-reaching significance for the land claims of both Torres Strait Islanders and Australian Aboriginal people. Its effects are still being felt in the 21st century, as indigenous communities establish claims to their traditional lands under the Native Title Act of 1993, On 1 July 1994, the Torres Strait Regional Authority (TSRA) was created. In March 2008, fifteen Torres Strait Islander Councils were amalgamated into a single body to form a Torres Strait Island Regional Council, or Torres Strait Island Region, created by the Queensland Government in the interest of financial viability, and accountability and transparency of local governments throughout the State. It is administered from Thursday Island, but Thursday, Horn Island, Prince of Wales Island and many others are under the Shire of Torres council. In the 2016 census, the population of the Torres Strait Islands was 4,514, of whom 4,144 (91.8%) were Torres Strait Islanders. These inhabitants live on only 14 of the 274 islands. For comparison, people identifying themselves as of Torres Strait Islander descent living in the whole of Australia numbered 32,345, while those of both Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal descent numbered a further 26,767.