65000 Years of Isolation in Aboriginal Australia or Continuity and External Contacts

An interesting article titled 65000 Years of Isolation in Aboriginal Australia or Continuity and External Contacts by Michael J. Rowland appeared in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of South Australia of· December 2018. The Abstract follows -

Recent dating of archaeological sites across northern Australia suggest that
Aboriginal Australians may have arrived on the continent by 65,000 years ago or
earlier though other general reviews propose a more conservative arrival date of
around 50,000 years. Regardless of when they actually arrived, the people of the
late Pleistocene landmass of Sahul (mainland Australia, Tasmania and New
Guinea), which were only separated by rising sea levels approximately 8000
years ago, likely shared some aspects of a common history over a period of
perhaps as much as 50,000 years. It would seem unlikely that this shared
community of culture and ideas would have ended abruptly with the rise in sea
level. Early commentators, operating within social evolutionism and diffusionism
frameworks, argued that much of Aboriginal culture was developed through
external contact since Aboriginal culture was too ‘primitive’ to have developed
higher level cultural traits. Subsequent reaction to this negative view has tended
to limit further enquiry. More recently, it has been recognised that
transformations occurred in Aboriginal societies across Australia particularly in
the mid to late Holocene which have been attributed to population growth and
internal social change (‘intensification’), environmental change and/or external
contacts. This paper reviews evidence for external culture contact with an
emphasis on the Queensland coast via the Torres Strait and Cape York. It is
apparent that contact did occur though the timing and extent of impacts on the
development of Aboriginal culture has yet to be fully understood. It is important
to periodically review what innovations might have reached Australia from
external sources (and vice versa) as new evidence and theories develop. This will
enhance an understanding of how Aboriginal peoples coped with and adapted to
the substantive transformative processes of the contact and post-contact eras
which is the theme of this volume.

The full article is available here.