{"id":336,"date":"2021-12-20T20:32:46","date_gmt":"2021-12-20T20:32:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/his111\/?post_type=chapter&p=336"},"modified":"2022-06-08T15:31:43","modified_gmt":"2022-06-08T15:31:43","slug":"6-4-oceania-and-ocean-explorations","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/his111\/chapter\/6-4-oceania-and-ocean-explorations\/","title":{"raw":"6.4 Oceania and Ocean Explorations","rendered":"6.4 Oceania and Ocean Explorations"},"content":{"raw":"

Australia, Papua New Guinea, Sahul<\/h2>\r\nOceania and the Pacific Ocean are the last area of our journey.\u00a0 Evidence of tools from 30,000 years ago exists in Australia, and from even longer in New Guinea. The lack of \u201ca dry land crossing to Sahul\u201d (the land mass that once connected New Guinea and Australia) meant that an ocean journey of somewhere between sixty-five and 100 kilometers was required from mainland Asia. This made Australians and New Guineans the first sea-going colonizers. Once in Sahul, how humans populated Australia is still the subject of some debate between those who support the \u201ccoastal hugger\u201d theory and those who support the idea of population by \u201coverlanders.\u201d The more difficult of the two means of populating Australia is overland, as it is more arid than the coasts, and the evidence for tools overland is not as advanced as that for the coast.\r\n\r\nIncreased sophistication as discussed in Module 1 was not limited to big game hunters. Campsites, rock art, and burial sites near Lake Mungo in Australia reveal how these early humans used pottery for cooking and had a diverse diet of birds, fish, and shellfish, a diet that seems to have kept them well-nourished.[1]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a> Australia was a society of hunter-gatherers until European colonization. Mobility was essential, with the continent\u2019s lack of widespread rainfall and rich soil. As a result, aboriginal Australians needed an extensive knowledge of their terrain and where to move when. Tasmanians would ambush wallabies at their seasonal grazing territory, while aborigines in the central deserts had to know when water holes would go dry. We also learn from the remains of Australian aborigines that foragers could be quite complex if they continued to hunt and gather for thousands of years. Aborigines painted, developed advanced weapons like the boomerang, warred against one another, developed creation myths, passed down oral histories, and played musical instruments.\r\n\r\nTo learn more about the people of New Zealand, Australia, Polynesia and other peoples of Oceania watch the video below on the DNA Project.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n