North Queensland wildlife and the environment
We recently drove down the coast to Mackay, then inland and South to Carnarvon Gorge before returning home via Clermont and Charters Towers. I will write about Cape Hillsborough and the Gorge in due course but first I will share my overwhelming impression from the 1800 km, twenty hour, trip: it’s flat!
Really, really, flat!
We have known for a long time that Australia is flat – old, worn down, eroded, etc – but there’s a difference between book-knowledge and body-knowledge.
In the middle of last year I compiled Where Did We Come From?, a sequence of articles and links about the evolution of our own species from the time we diverged from other apes up to the last few tens of thousands of years ago. The later articles in that sequence focused on Australia and crept ever closer to our own time. In the interests of making all the material more manageable, this post is the Australian content of Where did we come from?
Continue reading “People in Australia before Europeans arrived”
Everyone with even the slightest interest in climate change has heard of the ‘hockey stick’ which showed in 1998 that recent warming is unprecedented in human history (the background is here, on wikipedia, if you want it).
What we may not have been particularly aware of was that it was based primarily on Northern hemisphere data. In hindsight, that meant there was the ghost of a hope that the temperature trend didn’t apply to Australia, but a team led by Joelle Gergis of Melbourne University has just laid that phantasm to rest: we now have our very own hockey stick.
