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Prehistoric Queensland contacts?

J

Jokodo

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Preface: this is not a Graham Hancock lost civilisation type of post. This is a the Polynesians' ancestors for around forget than we give them credit for and Aboriginal Australians where never quite isokated as we like to imagine kind of post.

So they found pottery shards on an island off the Queensland coast and dated them to almost 3000 years old. They were apparently produced locally. The time of their production matches what we know about when the Lapita culture reached the Southern Coast of Papua New Guinea, a culture that colonised large areas of Near Oceania more than a millennium before the Polynesian expansion and its generally credited as the bearers of the first wave of the expansion of the Austronesian language family into Oceania.

Now I'm not saying its impossible Australian Aboriginals fully independently developed pottery. While I'm no archaeologist and what formal training I had in anthropology had give rusty, if you ask me, hyperdiffusionism was one of the greatest misconceptions of modern anthropology, and specifically for pottery, we know it has been independently discovered at least three times elsewhere, at least once by hunter gatherers. If this finds had been 2000 years older or from a place 2000km further South, I'd put money on a local origin.

But the time and place are what they so I'd trend to follow the researchers interpretation that north Queensland was involved in a network of trade and exchange dousing the Coral Sea art around the time of the Lapita expansion, though not necessarily colonised by the Lapita themsekves.

Any thoughts from our resident Queenlanders or anyone else knowledeable about the subject?

 
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I did the last edit on the phone. Bad idea.

1st paragraph: the Polynesians' ancestors for got around forget farther than we give them credit for; isokated isolated.
3rd paragraph: what formal training I had in anthropology had give has gone rusty
4th paragraph: I'd trend tend to follow, a network of trade and exchange dousing spanning the Coral Sea art at around the time; themsekves themselves
 
BH said:
I have read the Australian aborigines made it to South America.
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That seems entirely unlikely for multiple reasons. If you remember some details as to when this was supposed to have happened and what the alleged evidence is, we can go into details about why this is so and what are some better explanations for the evidence.

What did happen is that Polynesians reached South America, or alternatively South Americans reached what's today French Polynesia, sometime around 1200 AD. It's often assumed it's the former due to Polynesians' famed navigational skills, but I've seen the argument made that the prevailing winds and currents make an accidental discovery in the opposite direction much more likely, and I don't think we have good evidence to decide one way or the other at the moment, except insofar as we can safely conclude that if it was the Polynesians who made the trip and established contact, they must have made it back home, as all the good, undisputed evidence is found on the Polynesian side.

The evidence for contact as such is solid enough.

Item one is the sweet potato, which is native to South America and was an established staple crop in much of the East Pacific when Europeans entered the scene. The details of its pre-colonial range are a bit cloudy because Europeans didn't always clearly distinguish between taro and sweet potato, but we know it seems to have been on board when the Polynesians reached Hawaii and New Zealand.

Item two is its name. The mere presence of the crop could be explicable by it drifting there along prevalent currents. I don't know how plausible that is in terms of the time it would take to get there, the tuber's or seed's salt tolerance and the the chance it wouldn't be eaten by a hungry fish or seabird in the way. What is entirely implausible though is that it would bring its human name along the trip: the word "kumara" of New Zealand English (via Maori, and similar words in other Pacific languages) ist almost the and as its equivalent in Quechua and many other languages of Western South America.

Item three is human genetics, for which I refer you to 2020 Nature paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2487-2
 
If you're thinking of "Population Y", an ancestry component found in some South American populations atc rates of a few percent (and absent in all North American samples studied) that shows more similarity with modern Papuans and Australians than modern East Asians, the key word is probably "modern". It seems that in the late Pleistocene, populations more closely resembling Melanesians than modern East Asians were widespread in Southeast Asia all the way up to Southern China and Japan, before being replaced and assimilated by Northeast Asian populations. There are even fossils that show as much. It seems more plausible that this component reached the Americas through Beringia from Japan - not because I consider the ancestors of Australians intrinsically incapable of seafaring, but because hugging the coast is so much easier than crossing 1000s of kilometres of open ocean against prevailing winds and currents.

Here's a video about this (yes, the guy had a background in archaeology; no, he hasn't done research specifically on this topic himself; yes, he cites his sources in the description and interviews people who have; no, I don't think video can replace the written word as a medium of scientific communication):
 
Thor Heyerdahl showed the Atlantic and Pacific could have been crossed by ancient people.

I watched a show on a Pacific island culture that navigates open ocean without any instruments.

The skill is passed down from generation to generation.

They go by smell, water temperature, and how the waves hit the boats.

As a demonstration they navigated on an overcast night from one island to another followed by a power boat. Each island was well beyond visual observation.
 
steve_bank said:
Thor Heyerdahl showed the Atlantic and Pacific could have been crossed by ancient people.

I watched a show on a Pacific island culture that navigates open ocean without any instruments.

The skill is passed down from generation to generation.

They go by smell, water temperature, and how the waves hit the boats.

As a demonstration they navigated on an overcast night from one island to another followed by a power boat. Each island was well beyond visual observation.
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Well, it makes sense... Waves will tend to radiate in circles/arcs around disruptions that are not aligned with the ripples caused by the wind, whose tangent is perpendicular to the direction of the center, and the larger waves from the wind will still carry the smaller waves from the land.

Combined with the smell of dirt/plants on the wind and such, yeah, it makes a pretty good navigational aid.
 
steve_bank said:
Thor Heyerdahl showed the Atlantic and Pacific could have been crossed by ancient people.
Click to expand...
Just because it was possible doesn't mean it happened. We know the Norse reached North America because we have evidence they did. We know there was continuous contact across the Bering Strait because there are archaeological cultures and a language family spanning both shores, and genetic data showing holocene North American admixture in East Asia. We know there was contact between Polynesians and South Americans for the reasons I outlined above. We now seem to have good evidence that there was contact between Queensland and areas in New Guinea or the Solomon Islands. We know that the ancestors of Australians and Papuans must have done at least a bit of island hopping in the pleistocene as there never was a land bridge all the way, and few other mammals made the jump (only mice and bats as far as I know; dingoes were almost certainly helped by humans much later, there aren't even any wolves in Indonesia west of the Wallace line).

We don't however have any evidence that anyone from the Old World reached the Americas before the Norse did a little over 1000 years ago. And not for a lack of archaeologists affiliated with private universities in Utah trying to show otherwise.
 
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steve_bank said:
I watched a show on a Pacific island culture that navigates open ocean without any instruments.

The skill is passed down from generation to generation.

They go by smell, water temperature, and how the waves hit the boats.

As a demonstration they navigated on an overcast night from one island to another followed by a power boat. Each island was well beyond visual observation.
Click to expand...
It's certainly impressive. There is however a world of difference between finding an island whose position and distance you know and sailing out into the unknown without even knowing there *is* going to be land (maybe guessing because you occasionally see driftwood coming that way), much less how much provisions you need to pack
 
Jokodo said:
There is however a world of difference between finding an island whose position and distance you know and sailing out into the unknown without even knowing there *is* going to be land (maybe guessing because you occasionally see driftwood coming that way), much less how much provisions you need to pack
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I'd assume they were fairly adept at extracting/collecting some nutrition and fresh water along the way, but it's hard to fathom the mindset of the eastbound polynesian seafarers, heading off into the unknown. If they weren't capable of sustaining themselves indefinitely at sea, were they planning a round trip? Did they get blown too far from home to make it back without replenishing, and so elect to continue east? How many individuals would it have required to establish a population that would reflect as it does, in the DNA of today's population? Maybe it was originally just one boat with a few people who lost/blown to S.A., but managed to return home with fantastic tales that inspired a journey of many??
There is an incredibly interesting tale to be told there, but we will probably never know it.
 
Jokodo said:
We don't however have any evidence that anyone from the Old World reached the Americas before the Norse did a little over 1000 years ago. And not for a lack of archaeologists affiliated with private universities in Utah trying to show otherwise.
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You'll have to excuse my sloppy wording. Of course people from the Old World have been reaching the New one quite regularly since the pleistocene, if by Old World we mean Chukotka, and by New World Alaska. I'm talking exclusively about transatlantic voyages from Europe or Africa here.
 
Well, Columbus sailed into the unbeknown looking for a shorter rote to India and bumped into the Americas.

But then Vikings made it to North America in open boats.

Genetics say there were multiple migrations to the Americas. They were transported by aliens, flew, walked, or crossed on water. And the land bridge that existed across the Bearing Sea. When the water was low there was a migration path south along the shore.

I believe how humans migrated to Australia was once a puzzle. When the seas were low they probably partly walked and party sailed.
 
steve_bank said:
Well, Columbus sailed into the unbeknown looking for a shorter rote to India and bumped into the Americas.

But then Vikings made it to North America in open boats.

Genetics say there were multiple migrations to the Americas. They were transported by aliens, flew, walked, or crossed on water. And the land bridge that existed across the Bearing Sea. When the water was low there was a migration path south along the shore.

I believe how humans migrated to Australia was once a puzzle. When the seas were low they probably partly walked and party sailed.
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I find the anthropological history of people in migration South through the Americas from the Bearing Strait to be quite interesting, myself: The Large Beaked Bird, Quetzalcoatl, etc. leading the people south to a sign of a promised land is quite prevalent across a number of cultures AFAIK. I would actually love to hear more about which cultures this still remains a part of, and which traditions have the clearest memory of their tribal legends surrounding it.
 
Jokodo said:
Preface: this is not a Graham Hancock lost civilisation type of post. This is a the Polynesians' ancestors for around forget than we give them credit for and Aboriginal Australians where never quite isokated as we like to imagine kind of post.

So they found pottery shards on an island off the Queensland coast and dated them to almost 3000 years old. They were apparently produced locally. The time of their production matches what we know about when the Lapita culture reached the Southern Coast of Papua New Guinea, a culture that colonised large areas of Near Oceania more than a millennium before the Polynesian expansion and its generally credited as the bearers of the first wave of the expansion of the Austronesian language family into Oceania.

Now I'm not saying its impossible Australian Aboriginals fully independently developed pottery. While I'm no archaeologist and what formal training I had in anthropology had give rusty, if you ask me, hyperdiffusionism was one of the greatest misconceptions of modern anthropology, and specifically for pottery, we know it has been independently discovered at least three times elsewhere, at least once by hunter gatherers. If this finds had been 2000 years older or from a place 2000km further South, I'd put money on a local origin.

But the time and place are what they so I'd trend to follow the researchers interpretation that north Queensland was involved in a network of trade and exchange dousing the Coral Sea art around the time of the Lapita expansion, though not necessarily colonised by the Lapita themsekves.

Any thoughts from our resident Queenlanders or anyone else knowledeable about the subject?

Click to expand...
It's a bit before my time, I have only been here since 1996.
 
I remember seeing an account of Thor Heyerdahl's expedition from my childhood. A very interesting experiment. TH and his fellow adventurers made a raft from balsa-tree logs, the Kon-Tiki, and sailed it from the west coast of South America to the Polynesian islands.

But it's very evident from genetic and linguistic evidence that Polynesians came from the west, the islands off of Southeast Asia, not the east, the west coast of South America.

As to the word *kumala ~ *kumara for sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), it traveled with the vegetable, making it a wander word.

Entries for KUMALA.1 [PN] Sweet Potato (Ipomoea): *ku(u)mala in Polynesian Lexicon Project Online - "It is possible that all forms outside of EP are borrowings as there are no early references to the plant in western Polynesia."

Maori kūmara - Wiktionary, the free dictionary - Tongan kumala - Wiktionary, the free dictionary - Hawaiian ʻuala - Wiktionary, the free dictionary - Quechua kumar - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

The Hawaiian form has a sound shift relative to most other Polynesian forms: /k/ -> /'/ (glottal stop):
Maori kūmara ~ Hawaiian ʻuala (sweet potato)
Maori koe ~ Hawaiian 'oe (you singular)
Maori koutou ~ Hawaiian ʻoukou (you plural)

Appendix:Oceanic Swadesh lists - Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Appendix:Austronesian Swadesh lists - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

So eastern Polynesians got the sweet potato before they colonized Hawaii with the colonists changing /k/ into /'/.

This suggests a scenario of some Polynesians making it all the way to South America, but finding a lot of people there, and not founding a colony there because of all those people. But from these people, they acquired sweet potatoes and a word for them, and they then returned westward with these vegetables to their fellow Polynesians.
 
Let's see The Numbers List - a big collection of words from 1 to 10 - also Numeral Systems of the World

Quechuan:
+Proto-Quechua - *suk - *ishkay - *kimsa - *çusku, *tawa - *pichqa - - *suqta - *qançis - *pusaq - *isqun - *çunka
C Quechua (Ancash) - huk - ishkay - kima - chusku - pitsqa - - hoqta - qanchis - puwaq - isqun - chunka
Peripheral (Cajamarca) - soq - ishkay - kimsa - trusku - pichqa - - soqta - qantris - pusaq - isqon - trunka
San Martín

Eastern Polynesian:
Rapanui - tahi - rua - toru - ha - rima - - ono - hitu - va’u - iva - ’ahuru
Tahitian - tahi - piti - toru - maha - pae - - ōno - hitu - va’u - iva - hō’e’ahuru
Maori - tahi - rua - toru - whā - rima - - ono - whitu - waru - iwa - tekau
Hawaiian - ‘e-kahi - ‘e-lua - ‘e-kolu - ‘e-hā - ‘e-lima - - ‘e-ono - ‘e-hiku - ‘e-walu - ‘e-iwa - ‘umi

Central Pacific (incl. E Polynesian):
Samoan - tasi - lua - tolu - fa - lima - - ono - fitu - valu - iva - sefulu
Tongan - taha - ua - tolu - fā - nima - - ono - fitu - valu - hiva - hongofulu
Fijian - e dua na - e rua na - e tolu na - e vā na - e lima na - - e ono na - e vitu na - e walu na - e ciwa na - e tini na

Western Malayo-Polynesian:
Malagasy - iráy - róa - télo - éfatra - dímy - - énina - fíto - válo - sívy - fólo
Indonesian (Malay) - satu - dua - tiga - empat - lima - - enam - tujuh - delapan - sembilan - sepuluh
Tagalog - isá - dalawá - tatló - ápat - limá - - ánim - pitó - waló - siyám - sampû

(Near Taiwan)
Chamorro - hacha - hu-gua - tulu - fatfat - lima - - gunum - fiti - gualu - sigua - manot

+Proto-Austronesian - *esa/isa - *duSa - *telu - *Sepat - *lima - - *enem - *pitu - *walu - *Siwa - *sa-puluq

To make it simpler, here are words for "five":
Proto-Quechuan: *pichqa
E Polynesian: rima, pae, rima, 'e-lima
C Pacific: lima, nima, e lima na
W Malayo-Polynesian: dímy, lima, limá
Chamorro: lima
Proto-Austronesian: *lima
 
steve_bank said:
The original Kon Tiki documentary. Crossing on an ancient bamboo boat.



And the book.
archive.org

The Kon Tiki Expedition : Heyerdahl,thor : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Source: Digital Library of IndiaScanning Centre: Banasthali UniversitySource Library: Central Library Mohanlal Sukhadia University,udaipurDate Accessioned:...
archive.org
Click to expand...

Remember how I said upthread that "hyperdiffusionism was one of the greatest misconceptions of modern anthropology?" Thor Heyerdahl is a prime offender, and much of his work was dedicated to bolstering the case for hyperdiffusionism, a 19th century concept that had already dropped out of favour among the anthropological and archaeological community of his time, and for good reason.

In his mind, "civilisation" likely emerged only once, in the Middle East. In his mind, when he showed that the Atlantic *could* be crossed by a primitive vessel not unlike the ones we know ancient Egyptians made, he had shown that's indeed how Mesoamerica and South America got civilisation.

He didn't believe the Polynesians to be capable of sailing upwind, so in his mind, they *must* have come from the East, and with the Kon Tiki expedition, he'd broken the last straw his detractors were clinging on to. He even went on to say that the people who originally settled SE Polynesia were white descendants of the Middle Easterners who had colonised the American tropics, partly based on a cherry picked reading of local legends that may well have been a distorted memory of European contact a few centuries earlier. So basically the Moai and the glyphs of Rapa Nui were created by Whites, who were only later replaced by swarthy settlers from what's today the US Pacific coast, the ancestors of the Polynesians we see today. If you think that sounds racist, I certainly agree. It was pseudoscience even back then, and none of his conjectures has stood up well against more recent evidence.

And yet, he can be rightly called one of the founders of experimental archaeology. People aren't always black and white.
 
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