Breaking down barriers: Prehistoric species dispersals across Island Southeast Asia, New Guinea and Australia

doi:10.1017/9781316686942.008

7 - Breaking down barriers: Prehistoric species dispersals across Island Southeast Asia, New Guinea and Australia

from III - Across the water: Species movements by Coast and Sea

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2017

Edited by

Rémy Crassard and

Tim Denham: Affiliation:
Australian National University
Nicole Boivin: Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena
Rémy Crassard: Affiliation:
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Lyon
Michael Petraglia: Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena

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Summary

Abstract

The Holocene histories of Island Southeast Asia, New Guinea and Australia have often been portrayed in terms of clear regional distinctions. Each region had a distinctive character or signature: the maritime landscapes of Island Southeast Asia were widely inhabited by hunter-gatherer-fisher communities prior to colonisation by Austronesian language-speaking farmer-voyagers ultimately derived from Taiwan, the island of New Guinea was a place of early and independent agricultural development and plant domestication, whereas Australia was the continent of hunter-gatherers until settlement by Europeans within the last 250 years. A consideration of new multidisciplinary data challenges these regional (mis)conceptions, which are heavily based on isolationist and essentialist characterisations of long-term history. Human-aided dispersals of animal and plant species shed an increasing light on the socio-spatial inter-connections between the people who inhabited these regions.

Keywords: Species dispersal, Holocene, animal domesticates, plant domesticates, regionalism

The regional histories of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA), New Guinea and Australia are often characterised as exclusive, disconnected worlds prior to the late Holocene, and to a large degree until the last 500 years or so. In this chapter, such an isolationist view is challenged through an evaluation of the human-aided dispersals of animal and plant species within each region and between regions over the long-term. Although they may not have been as deeply enmeshed within a proto-globalised Old World as some other regions, either in terms of antiquity or degree, these three regions were still inter-connected. For example, this is clearly demonstrated by the dispersal of the dog/dingo (Canis familiaris), a Eurasian domesticate, to Australia by ca. 3,500 years ago.

In this chapter, the dispersals of animals and plants to and across ISEA, New Guinea and Australia are used to shed light on broader patterns of socio-spatial interconnection over the long-term. These dispersals show that these regions were not as isolated from each other, or the broader Old World, as is often portrayed. Certainly, there were distance-decay effects in terms of how species – as well as the knowledge of how to cultivate or husband them – dispersed, but these reflect geography rather than anything fundamentally different in the character of regional cultures or their histories.

Type: Chapter
Information: Human Dispersal and Species Movement
From Prehistory to the Present
, pp. 164 - 193

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316686942.008 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2017

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