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Ed Australia New Zealand - settlement

Elf Grinder 3000

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Elf Grinder 3000
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I had a question about how New Zealand + Australia were settled.

I was under the impression New Zealand was settled by people from New Guinea or the Philipeans. But Austrailia was never settled by these people despite being like 500 miles close to the Philipeans and Guinea.

Why is this, why was austrailia never populated by tribes from the area, it just had aborigines.

Thanks
 
Elf Grinder 3000 said:
I had a question about how New Zealand + Australia were settled.

I was under the impression New Zealand was settled by people from New Guinea or the Philipeans. But Austrailia was never settled by these people despite being like 500 miles close to the Philipeans and Guinea.

Why is this, why was austrailia never populated by tribes from the area, it just had aborigines.

Thanks
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The linguistic evidence indicates that NZ was probably settled by peoples from Eastern Polynesia (these languages today spread from roughly Hawaii to NZ), and trace back ultimately to Taiwan (most probably). In the case of NZ, this happened rather recently. The estimates vary considerably, but they are pretty much all within the last 2000 years. Australia, on the other hand, has been settled for over 40 000 years.

By the time that Austronesian speakers (the family of languages to which the Polynesian languages belong) began to spread outwards from Taiwan, they already discovered the ability to navigate on the open ocean. This is why speakers of Austronesian languages can be found from Madagascar to Hawaii today. They reached pretty much all the unsettled land in the Pacific.

As to why they didn't settle in Australia as well, there are a lot of possible reasons. One is that it already had people who had spent 40 000 years learning to live there. It would be awfully hard to compete with the locals, at least until technology had progressed far enough to make such competition feasible. Another possible reason is that much of Australia is...er...rather hard to live in to begin with.
 
Thanks for the info. I am still surprised that these people would go all the way to NZ and even hawaii. But no Australia.

I guess that doesnt say much for Austrailia then.
 
Elf Grinder 3000 said:
Thanks for the info. I am still surprised that these people would go all the way to NZ and even hawaii. But no Australia.

I guess that doesnt say much for Austrailia then.
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They hopped from Island to Island in an arc that went East of Australia and the areas already inhabited by the Melanesians. By this route I think the ancestors of the Maoris would have found it easier to reach NZ than Australia.

However, there was contact between Australia and its neighbours. See the Macassans, the Torres Strait and the Dingo for three examples.
 
This map might be useful to you. There are gene mapping projects which are tracing human migration out of Africa. The results correlate closely with linguist evolution maps with a few exceptions where the established group adopted the arriving group's language instead of the more common pattern of the other way around.


The Journey of Mankind (Looks interesting but I have not watched it.)

This program however, Genomic Views of Human History I have watched several times and highly recommend it. It's about an hour long UW science lecture but well worth it.
New tools of genomic analysis are being used to shed light on historical puzzles. Migrations of ancient peoples, the effects of geographic boundaries on human movements, origins of ethnic groups, and racial differences are now the focus of integrated analysis by historians, anthropologists and geneticists. "When people move, they take their genes along and pass them on to their descendants in their new homes," Dr. Mary-Claire King states. "Thus, every present-day population retains clues to its ancient roots. Common ancestries can be confirmed and human migrations traced by comparing DNA sequences of present-day populations."
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The map I saw of the migration showed it to be more of a Northern island hopping on a path going straight past Australia, and then doubling back a little to get to New Zealand.
 
There was no real reason to extend beyond New Zealand. For the people coming from the East it was the mother load by comparison to island chains they had previously encountered. There was nothing on the East coast Australia they could not get at home. The population and resource pressure had not built to the extent they had to move on.

I am sure a few expeditions came across and took a look, but there was simply not the motivation to expand into Australia
 
Not only did they only 'recently' find New Zealand (a few hundred years before Captain Cook), but there are not many islands between Australia and New Zealand. Then when you get to Australia lack of water is a huge problem. Then in many places the land is not very fertile. As mentioned above the natives were not very friendly.
 
rjh01 said:
Not only did they only 'recently' find New Zealand (a few hundred years before Captain Cook), but there are not many islands between Australia and New Zealand. Then when you get to Australia lack of water is a huge problem. Then in many places the land is not very fertile. As mentioned above the natives were not very friendly.
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That is interesting, it seems like NZ was the last discovered place on earth. At least a place where people eventually settled permanently.
 
Elf Grinder 3000 said:
That is interesting, it seems like NZ was the last discovered place on earth. At least a place where people eventually settled permanently.
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There are many others. Iceland might be one, depending on how one evaluates the archaeological evidence. Some Pacific islands such as Easter Island and Pitcairn, also. Or the Falkland Islands.
 
Elf Grinder 3000 said:
I had a question about how New Zealand + Australia were settled.

I was under the impression New Zealand was settled by people from New Guinea or the Philipeans. But Austrailia was never settled by these people despite being like 500 miles close to the Philipeans and Guinea.

Why is this, why was austrailia never populated by tribes from the area, it just had aborigines.
Click to expand...

Well, it depends on what you mean by 'just had Aborigines'.

The first immigrations onto mainland Australia happened about 40 000 years go, when ocean levels meant island hopping was a little easier. This probably occurred down through the South East Asian island chain, via Indonesia and New Guinea. So, in some ways, our indigenous population could be considered as being 'from' that area.

Aborigines aren't a homogenous group, however, There is evidence of a number of immigrations over time, with a wide number of language groups and genetic lineages across the continent. Torres Straight Islanders prefer to be recognised as such, and not lumped together with all Aborigines. Personally, from what I know of indigenous culture and history, it's a pretty smart move. Too many people view indigenous culture with their nationalistic glasses on, preferring to see it as a single, unitised country rather than a splintering of hundreds, if not thousands of cultures.

Maoris are more closely related to the Polynesian populations and settled New Zealand far more recently than the first Australians. Population, cultural and language differences can easily be accounted for the fact that the last exchanges between pre-settlement, Asian Aboriginal ancestors and the ancestors of pre-NZ colonisation Polynesians would have been many tens of thousands of years ago.

Athon
 
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