In this chapter, we deal first with the colonization by Homo sapiens of the islands of Wallacea (eastern Indonesia and the Philippines), Australia, and the inner islands of the western Pacific, an entirely tropical achievement requiring seacraft that occurred around 50,000 years ago. Then we move to the younger and far less tropical colonizations of Japan (circa 40,000 years ago) and the Americas (circa 16,000 years ago). The focus is on Paleolithic colonizations of previously uninhabited lands by processes that required crossing either a sea gap or a land bridge, or combinations of both. In the case of North America, some fairly rigid paleoenvironmental constraints determined the date of first settlement from an immediate Siberian homeland region located very close to the Arctic Circle.
As discussed in Chapter 3, modern humans with a Middle Paleolithic technology spread from tropical Africa via the Levant and Arabia to tropical Sundaland by at least
70,000 years ago, without really needing to exit the warm latitudes below the tropic of Cancer (except in Iran and Pakistan). Life in the continuously warm tropics has certain obvious advantages. For a hunter and gatherer (or a farmer for that matter), it is not necessary to invest huge amounts of time in manufacturing warm clothing or substantial shelters. Ethnographic accounts of tropical Southeast Asian hunters and gatherers, like the Andaman Islanders described by Radcliffe-Brown (1922), indicate the use of quite flimsy pole and thatch shelters made of bamboo and palm products that were simply abandoned when the group moved. They had minimal clothing - fiber, leaf, or bark cloth waist bands (often nothing for children) - and carried little else apart from what appear to have been remarkably widespread traditions of body painting and scarification (tattooing was a Neolithic introduction into Southeast Asia).
Tropical Australian populations had similar forms of clothing and shelter at contact, although marsupial skin cloaks were required in the colder south of Australia and the island of Tasmania (Gilligan 2008). The series of photographs taken by Baldwin Spencer (1982) on his two Northern Territory expeditions in 1901-2 and 1911-2 reveal many remarkable details from the center and north of the continent - tree bough and bark shelters, neck and arm ornaments, waist strings of human hair or pandanus fiber,
First Migrants: Ancient Migration in Global Perspective, First Edition. Peter Bellwood. © Peter Bellwood. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Tasseled aprons for women and pubic coverings for men, and intricate body painting and cicatrization. Very often, no clothing was worn at all, and Spencer noted how remarkable it was that people, especially children, could go naked through the night in the middle of the fairly cold central Australian winter.1
World History
