Tag: human prehistory

Recent updates to Green Path

The quiet time between Christmas and New Year seems particularly appropriate for setting one’s home in order. There’s the purely practical need to clean up the festive mess, but also a more… spiritual, dare I say? …sense that one should at least attempt to begin a new year on a good footing. There’s also the free time created by the gaps in competing engagements.

In the case of Green Path, such a clean-up takes the form of some extra site maintenance.

  • Two long posts about human prehistory, Where did we come from? and People in Australia before Europeans arrived, have been tidied up by incorporating supplementary material from their Comments into the body of each post.
  • I have added one new Category, Overseas travel. That’s a little ironic, since we haven’t ventured overseas since before the 2019 floods, but it’s useful because it gathers together 15 older posts.
  • Green Path is a major part of a larger website. The other blog on it, Words & Images (mainly arts and social issues), has received similar attention.
  • The Book review index, which straddles both blogs, has been brought up to date. (I don’t publish reviews of books unless I think they are worth reading, so you might find something there if Santa didn’t bring you enough books.)

People in Australia before Europeans arrived

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”

Many Peaks Range and Magnetic Island

My very first impression of Townsville’s landscape, thirty years ago, was of dead-flat land interrupted by peculiarly isolated hills and ranges, and it has only been reinforced over the years by views and events.

The views? Getting to know the topography from the top of Castle Hill, Mt Stuart or (most recently) Mt Marlow on the Town Common reveals a coastal landscape of mangrove flats rising (minimally) to the suburbs which wrap around the bases of the hills, with Ross River, Ross Creek and the Bohle River winding lazily through them.

Continue reading “Many Peaks Range and Magnetic Island”

Where did we come from?

Where Did We Come From? is the title of a book written by Carl Zimmer in the wake of the discovery of the “hobbits” of Flores fifteen years ago. It was a very good popular introduction to human evolution.

According to Zimmer, our African ancestors parted company with the ancestors of chimpanzees and bonobos six or seven million years ago to begin developing an upright posture, tool use and, perhaps most importantly, language. Our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved about 200,000 years ago and began spreading out of Africa 130,000 years ago, through Europe, Asia, Australia and, eventually, America. We lived alongside closely related species until comparatively recent times. Neanderthals reached Europe before we did and coexisted with us there until 28,000 years ago, if not later. The ‘hobbits’ of Flores, by far the most spectacular recent discovery in the field, survived as recently as 18,000 years ago, well after Homo sapiens had migrated through South Asia and the islands to Australia.

Given the pace of discovery in the field, Zimmer’s book is now somewhat out of date. This collection of recent articles introduces research which adds depth and complexity to Zimmer’s account without changing its broad outlines. I have assembled them here in evolutionary order. Continue reading “Where did we come from?”