Submitted 7 hours ago by Innerworld@lemmy.world to anthropology@mander.xyz
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Spreading_homo_sapiens.jpg
This map shows the spread of Homo sapiens out of Africa and across the globe, with very approximate dates.
Author: Altaileopard in 2006
If those ‘dates’ are supposed to be ‘years ago’ in those unlabeled numbers NZ is wrong, it should be 800-1000.
Also the Polynesian diaspora is woefully underrepresented by that tiny misshapen Pacific Ocean.
I think it’s such a funny quark of history that the Polynesians, despite their incredible sea exploration abilities, just apparently completely missed Australia.
I don’t think they “missed” it. I think it happened with Australia the same as here in South America: Polynesians were aware of the existence of those lands, sometimes even traded with the locals, but long-term settlements would be impossible because those locals would kick them out. And the locals couldn’t invade Polynesian lands either because the “lands” in question were the sea, and they’d rather focus on land tech instead.
I don’t know. There is linguistic, archeological and genetic evidence that the Polynesians traded with the South Americans, but I don’t think there is nearly as robust evidence for Australia.
Current evidence as I understand it is really just as that map depicts it. That they went straight from Indonesia to New Zealand, and just missed Australia.
Why did it take so long for humans to get to Madagascar? Even Australia was reached much sooner, and that’s so much farther away and separated by wider oceans.
Apparently Madagascar was discovered before this picture says, potentially as early as 8500 BCE. The date there is for unambiguous continued human presence, that starts at 490 CE.
It was all dry land to Indonesia, inbetween indonesia and australia there is deep ocean, but during the ice age it was lowland all the way out through indonesia.
ptychodus@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
The map is out of date for the Americas. ~22kbp footprints in NM, among other earlier dates.
ace_garp@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
And for Australia 50,000 is old data. The current timeline is 60-70,000 years of human habitation.