The Earliest Settlement of New Guinea and Australia

Unambiguous evidence of early settlement on the island of New Guinea came surprisingly late given the intense interest anthropologists had given the region. By 1965 it was clear that during the Pleistocene, New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania formed a single land mass that has come to be known as Sahul. Chappell suggests that the period was characterized by sea levels 50 m below their current height. These lower sea levels exposed considerable stretches of land to human settlement that is now submerged, which may account for some of the difficulty archaeologists have had in finding early lowland sites. Yet even with low sea levels, settlement of Sahul from an equally vast Southeast Asian landmass (known as Sunda) was not a simple matter because a deep sea trench separated the two and required some sort of sea crossing. Kirch has referred this crossing as the first ‘‘purposive voyaging in the history of humankind.’’

The earliest settlement of Sahul remains highly controversial. Fullagar et al. proposed a thermolu-minesence date for the Jinmium rockshelter in Australia of a very early date (176 000-116 000 BP), and Roberts et al. dated a site called Malakunanja in Arnhem land to 55 000 BP. These dates remain tentative but suggest that humans have probably inhabited Sahul for at least 50 000 years. The first evidence of early settlement in New Guinea began to emerge in the 1960s when Susan Bulmer and Peter White excavated sites in the Central Highlands dated at 8000-11 000 BP. White et al. reported on an even earlier site at Kosipe in the Owen Stanley Range dated to 26 000 BP.

More recently, Les Groube excavated what remains the earliest site on the New Guinea mainland at Bobongara on an uplifted terrace of the Huon Peninsula dated to 40 000-60 000 BP. Uplift seems to have protected this site while other early coastal sites were submerged. (Currently this site is being proposed as a World Heritage site.) Groube suggests that a kind of agroforestry was being practiced during much of this early period. Gorecki et al. and Smith and Sharp have also identified settlement sites in New Guinea dating to 30 000 BP or earlier (at Lachitu and Kuk, respectively). There is now unambiguous evidence for the human settlement of New Guinea for more than 30 000 years, and further excavations may double this date.