That modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) reached further still more than 60,000 years ago is clear from discoveries right across New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania (then joined to Australia). There are finds of axes from northern New Guinea that can be shown to be 40,000–60,000 years old.7 In 2017 Australian archaeologists announced the discovery of a rock shelter in northern Australia that contained implements dating back to 65,000 years ago, and wondered whether there was interaction between what seem to be the first Australian members of Homo sapiens and other types of human who could still be found in east Asia, notably the mysterious Denisovans, who are thought to have been similar to but different from the European Neanderthals.8 There is therefore no doubt that the original Aborigines (very possibly the ancestors of the modern ones) arrived on the continent more than 60,000 years ago; and they must have done so by crossing spaces of over a hundred miles of open sea, often finding themselves out of sight of land.9 Archaeologists sometimes express surprise and puzzlement at the idea that early humans of the sapiens type could have turned into sailors. But it is not at all surprising; as humans, of various types, moved out of Africa to colonize much of the world by land they had to cross rivers, and used the skills learned on rivers to cross lakes; and having learned about lakes seas were a challenge, but one that could be met. Short sea journeys taken by the first humans to move eastwards on the route out of Africa may well have included a crossing of the Red Sea near Aden and a crossing of the Persian Gulf near Hormuz. These early humans had plenty of mental equipment, which they turned to good use in establishing that extraordinary mastery over nature that the Australian Aborigines still possess. It makes more sense to insist on that ability than to speculate about the types of boats these travellers might have used; bamboo, logs, bark boats, reed boats and much else have been suggested, but no archaeological evidence has been found, which is hardly surprising; if any remains survive from the very earliest journeys they lie on the long-submerged coast of the Sahul continent.10 So the best answer is that in 65,000 years of travel boat designs must have changed, and that in any case boats would have been adapted to appropriate conditions; sails might have been developed where wind was a vital factor in reaching a place, but not when inter-island navigation was possible in calm waters within sight of land.11
When looking at the relationship between the original inhabitants of Australia and the sea several considerations have to be borne in mind. One is that exploitation of the coastline for food, whether that involves fishing from boats or foraging on beaches, does not provide proof of longer-distance travel across the sea and of the making of connections with other communities, either elsewhere in Australia or on islands beyond its shores. Another is that the use of modern evidence, such as Aboriginal opinions about the nature of the sea, though unavoidable, is very problematic. Tribes have moved around; physical conditions have changed; Aboriginal technology has also changed, as the people of the land have adapted themselves to local conditions, and as contact with Europeans has radically (and often disastrously) transformed daily life, inherited knowledge and social attitudes.
At various times the Australian interior was more hospitable to life than it is now, and the earliest settlers headed inland, looking for fresh water; Aboriginal tribes began to colonize the coastlines rather later, about 30,000 years ago at most, judging from current archaeological evidence; no site older than around 33,000 BC has been found on the coast. The continent remained very lightly populated; there was apparently no pressure to occupy coastal land, because food was readily available elsewhere. Shells found at cave sites a little way into the interior show how links were forged between coastal settlements and the population of inner Australia; but these shells almost certainly came as ornaments rather than food, and early sites close to the coast often reveal a diet based as much, or much more, on local fauna such as wallabies, rather than fish.12 But the interior became increasingly arid, and living on the coast became more attractive; stone fish traps found in the Kimberley region, on the north coast of Western Australia, have been dated to a maximum of 3,500 years ago, but there is every reason to argue that these are the lineal descendants of earlier fish traps that were widely used along the Australian coast.13
These fish traps were a common feature of life in the Torres Strait Islands, the chain of islands between Australia and New Guinea. Nowadays it is standard usage in Australia to speak of ‘the Aboriginal peoples and the Torres Strait islanders’, recognizing the distinct status, origin and culture of the people of these islands, whose technology has long been more advanced than that of the Australian Aborigines: more Neolithic than Old Stone Age. Ethnically, they are closer to the peoples of Papua New Guinea and Melanesia, and in recent times at least cultural influences from New Guinea have been profound, including myths, rituals and technology. In the Torres Strait, groups of people could be found who operated very different economies: some who depended on small-scale agriculture, and others who were ‘saltwater people’, making extensive use of the sea, including voyages back and forth between islands and to the coasts of both New Guinea and Australia, setting out in dugout canoes with outriggers and sails.14 Some of these influences from the north were then transmitted along the north-east coast of Australia to Aboriginal peoples living by the sea: masks and headdresses of types familiar from Papua New Guinea were being used along the shoreline when the first Europeans explored what is now known as Queensland, and other borrowings may have included types of harpoon and fish hook. In modern times, fish and sea creatures such as turtles and dugongs completely dominate the diet of the Torres Strait islanders, supplying about two thirds of a kilo per day, on average. Saltwater people using bark boats went out into the open sea to catch pelagic fish, that is, fish that live near the surface of the sea. They developed trading links with their neighbours, which can be traced back with certainty to around AD 1650 when Indonesian merchants from Macassar became regular visitors; however, all the signs are that this was a much more ancient connection, and that as a result of wider contacts some Aboriginal peoples such as the Yolŋu (roughly pronounced Yol-ngu) knew a little about the world beyond their coastline.15
In the Torres Strait, on the island of Mer – which, according to one legend, was a giant dugong who lay down in the middle of the sea and became land – evidence abounds that this area had become a trading station at the centre of a lively network of maritime trade, certainly 2,000 years ago but almost certainly in the much more distant past as well.16 The bones of dogs, rats, dugongs, turtles and of many types of fish provide part of the proof that the rich resources of the sea were fully exploited, but a bone pipe dating to around AD 1 indicates wider trading links. The islanders appear to have developed outrigger canoes that made contact across the sea safe and regular. Their style of boat influenced the design of canoes along the coast of Queensland.17 The islands of the Torres Strait, then, and their sea-based population, formed a sea bridge between the cultures of prehistoric Melanesia and those of northern Australia which, thanks to the sea, were not as isolated from the outside world as is easily assumed. The Torres Strait islanders were venturesome sailors, but others were much more cautious in their dealings with the open sea. One Aboriginal people in Australia insist that the sea is alive and that it has angry moods during which it is likely to kill people: ‘when you are on the sea you mustn’t say anything bad about it. Not criticise it. Because the sea is alive, like a person. So you must respect it.’18 On Croker Island, not far from Darwin in the Northern Territory, the Aborigines claim that the great Rainbow Serpent inhabits the seabed and has to be placated through special rituals, because the serpent will use the sea to kill and maim. In the same region, the Yanyuwa people describe themselves as ‘people who originate in the sea’,19 and their boats, like the sea, became animate. Humans could impregnate their boats with magical power by singing ‘power songs’ that would calm the sea and that would stay inside the boat, as if it possessed its own soul.20
It was to the north of
New Guinea that really striking changes would occur, with the colonization of the Pacific islands. Some islands off the north coast of New Guinea were colonized 35,000 years ago. The Solomon Islands were being visited 29,000 years ago, and raiders from New Guinea remained a threat to Solomon islanders over the centuries.21 The Admiralty Islands were settled 13,000 years ago, if not earlier, and these involved a sea journey of nearly 100 miles, including navigation out of sight of land. One site, on Buka in the Solomon Islands, yielded evidence that the diet of the settlers around 26,000 BC included fish and shellfish as well as mammals and lizards.22 But man cannot live by fish alone, and the availability of one vital necessity was counterbalanced by the lack of other necessities. Sometimes there was no hard stone suitable for cutting. In that case it was necessary to obtain obsidian or another prime cutting stone from further afield. Although the distance is not great, obsidian from New Britain has been found on New Ireland, both in the vicinity of New Guinea, and assigned a date of 20,000 BP (‘Before the Present’). There are plenty of doubters, however. It has been suggested that times of low sea levels are precisely the times when there is no incentive to cross the sea, because there is more land to colonize. When the sea level rises, the land shrinks and people go in search of new land.23 But all this is speculation. We simply do not know.
III
The name given to the culture that spread across vast tracts of the prehistoric Pacific is ‘Lapita’. Amid all the speculation it is no surprise to find that this is not the name any people gave to themselves, but the name of the archaeological site where their distinctive culture was first identified. An extraordinary feature of Lapita culture is its spread. No other prehistoric culture embraces such a large geographical area, in this case including both the Solomon Islands, which had been settled very early, and islands as remote as Fiji and Samoa.24 The vast majority of the islands where Lapita settlers arrived were virgin territory, far beyond the range of the earliest Austronesian navigators. That is not to say that the Lapita navigators were the descendants of the earliest Austronesian settlers who had ventured beyond New Guinea millennia earlier. The genetic identity of the Lapita people remains uncertain, and the best answer is that they consisted of a mix of peoples of various origins who gave rise to the varied populations of Polynesia and much of Melanesia; the uniformity of their culture was not necessarily backed by uniformity in their appearance, and woolly-haired Melanesians and straight-haired Polynesians (those are already generalizations taken too far) participated in a single culture. Rather, this culture seems to have had an initial focal point in the western Pacific, probably in Taiwan, where the language of the indigenous population is related to those spoken across Oceania; and later on it was disseminated outwards from newer focal points deeper in the Pacific, notably Samoa. Taiwan was itself home to a lively prehistoric culture in the third millennium BC, and pottery found in the northern Moluccas is strikingly similar to that of the Polynesian Lapita, suggesting ancestral links to the inhabitants of the islands off the south-east coast of Asia. As speakers of Austronesian languages mixed with the population along and off the coast of New Guinea, an ethnically mixed population came into being, whose varied origins are reflected in their DNA. The route they took, over many centuries, therefore began in the Bismarck archipelago before they spread eastwards through the Solomons.25
Lapita represents a change of gear in oceanic expansion. Until about 1500 BC local exchanges between islands are easily provable from fragments of obsidian, the sharp-edged volcanic glass that was traded between islands, in return for what it is hard to say – probably foodstuffs, but even the term ‘trade’ must be used with caution; people may simply have gone out to volcanic islands to collect the material off the beaches. The Lapita folk brought pottery, which is their distinctive archaeological ‘signature’, and they brought animals for which there is no earlier evidence in the islands, notably pigs, dogs and domestic birds.26 They also brought Pacific rats, and the bones of these stowaways can be used to date the arrival of navigators in islands across much of the Pacific; here again the evidence strongly indicates gradual movement from west to east.27 In broad terms, they were a Neolithic (‘New Stone Age’) people or group of peoples, familiar with agriculture, stock-rearing and ceramics.28 Farming transformed the environment of one island after another, as land was cleared for agriculture and as local species of birds were hunted, eaten and driven to extinction; the most famous case, much later, would be the giant moa birds of New Zealand, but there were local crocodiles and giant iguanas that proved unable to resist human conquest.
On the other hand, the settlers proved to be experts in agronomy, for they transformed the often limited resources of islands in Remote Oceania (the area around Fiji and Samoa) that were so isolated that they offered few fruits and none of the tubers which provided the staple starch in their diet. Twenty-eight species of plant have been identified that were brought across the ocean by the Lapita people: bananas, breadfruit, sugar cane, yams, coconuts, wild ginger and bamboo were some of the most significant, though different types of island were suited to different types of plant – yams flourished best in Melanesia. (Another arrival was the sweet potato, apparently from South America, which raises the question of whether Polynesian navigators at some stage reached the opposite side of the Pacific.) The proto-Oceanic vocabulary, reconstructed by philologists, offers words for planting, weeding, harvesting and the mounds under which yams were grown, once again suggesting that the horticultural traditions of the Lapita went far back in time to the days when their ancestors lived in Taiwan.29 The arrival of plants from places further west suggests that the voyages eastwards were indeed colonizing ventures, and were not accidental discoveries by lost navigators stranded on desert islands, a question to which it will be necessary to return. The movement of the Lapita peoples across the ocean may not seem rapid. One estimate for the time taken to reach western Polynesia from the Bismarck archipelago is 500 years. Yet this may only represent twenty generations, which in the larger scheme of things makes this expansion quite fast, even, in the timescale of prehistorians, explosive.
The motives behind this movement of people are hard to fathom. One historian of Polynesian navigation, David Lewis, identified a spirit of adventure – a ‘restless urge’ – among Polynesians, citing the Raiateans from Tahiti, who would go voyaging for several months, touring the islands of that part of the ocean. They were observed by Joseph Banks, Captain Cook’s scientific companion, so the evidence is late and somewhat circumstantial. David Lewis also pointed to the ‘proud self-respect’ of the navigators, a pride that would prompt sailors to set out to sea in bad weather if, for instance, they saw that the natives of an island they were visiting were taking to the sea, even just to fish. This idea fits well with the concepts of honour and shame of which anthropologists studying these ocean societies have written. Viking-style raids between islands have also been postulated; one could imagine a first phase during which the raiders took away coconuts, obsidian and breadfruit that they found on deserted islands; then, following settlement, inter-island wars were certainly common.30 But these cases suit a world already partly settled; the question here is how and why the settlement occurred in the first place. Overpopulation might seem the obvious choice, but there is not enough evidence to suggest dense settlement of the western islands and intolerable pressure on resources.31
As the settlers moved further eastwards, they left behind diseases brought millennia ago from New Guinea and eastern Asia, such as malaria – unsullied island habitats are often healthy, and offer a long life expectancy. But the longer people live and the healthier they are, the greater number of children they can expect to have, with a better chance of survival to adulthood. In such an environment younger children might take part in migration almost as a matter of course, on the proven assumption that there were plenty of places to settle out in the ocean. The Polynesians set great store by genealogies, emphasizing the rights of eldest children, while sibling rivalry
is a constant feature of Polynesian legends, suggesting that younger sons were well advised to keep on the move till they found a new homestead.32 One idea is that the early Polynesians were primarily dependent on what the sea offered – ‘ocean foragers’ – and that the search for the produce of the sea brought them further and further out into the ocean, followed by the development of farming settlements as the pioneers bedded down in their new homes. In ‘Remote Oceania’ their seafood diet included not just oysters, clams and cowries but turtles, eels, parrot fish and sharks; most of this fishy diet came from the edges of the reefs or from even closer to shore. There is no evidence of short-term camps as voyagers squatted in islands; they arrived in new places and they created homes there; and they preferred to live on the shore, carefully choosing sites that offered access to the open sea through gaps in the reefs that surrounded many of the islands. There they built wooden houses on stilts, a type of house widely dispersed throughout the Austronesian world. This was not a sudden invasion of strings of uninhabited islands, but a process of steady expansion eastwards (not necessarily in a straight line).33
The Boundless Sea Page 4