An interesting anthropological read:
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/history-wars/2002/06/the-extinction-of-the-australian-pygmies/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/history-wars/2002/06/the-extinction-of-the-australian-pygmies/
Australian Pygmies?
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Yep .....But they are not extinct.....I work with a couple 
Thanks for sharing BW
That's a great read thanks.
Smoky bandit said:Yep .....But they are not extinct.....I work with a couple
Pygmies or mental midgets ?
BigWave said:
thanks for posting . i knew nothing about them so its good to get a little enlightenment.
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:8HeadsUp said:Smoky bandit said:Yep .....But they are not extinct.....I work with a couple
Pygmies or mental midgets ?
I would be a little wary of Windschuttle and Quadrant (i.e. strongly political rather than a scientific journal or scientist). A desire for multiple waves of different people, questioning who are the "first" people. You may have heard of the "history wars". The basic descriptions are presumably accurate though, but I suspect that the genetics are known by now (those on other aborigines in general do not show much support for distinct waves of migration, but do show some evolutionary links with "negrito" and other people of southeast Asia). Not so much as mixing of different groups but as a continuum (so southern Indian people and particularly those in the Andaman Islands who recently killed a missionary there are quite close genetically to Australian aborigines). Stature can change quite rapidly more or less in place to suit local conditions (many such people seem to live in rain forests), and is not a reliable indicator of a different wave of people. Local conditions such as dense vegetation, limited sunlight etc can have evolutionary effects - there are pygmy humans in the African Congo but also pygmy elephants and pygmy deer - pygmy elephants also occur in the thick forests around Knysna in the South African Cape. These Australian have no relationship at all to the "pygmy" people of Africa of course (no more than you or I) - who are genetically somewhat similar to other people of that continent. It is just a descriptive term relating to size as used here.
Interesting though.
Interesting though.
A murray friend of mine in north queensland told me a story once of the "hairy men" in north queensland that the old people had told him. Often wondered if these stories were based on the real life pigmy people ? Apparently they where more wide spread before being pushed out by later arrivals only to hang on in the rainforest areas.
I did more reading on this , There are still sightings occurring of short ( 1.0 - 1.33 metre tall ) indigenous people from 1955 - 1990's in Kurrajong , Singleton , Tully , Atherton - Cape York and others.
Funny how we think we know stuff about the world around us. and then we find that we know jack.
Lizzy Woods
http://www.fotostrada.com/brian-cassey/indigenous-australia/BCI22
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news...ff9a1d351?sv=92d6483855d8b16adfe1b26eb0eacae8
Funny how we think we know stuff about the world around us. and then we find that we know jack.
Lizzy Woods
http://www.fotostrada.com/brian-cassey/indigenous-australia/BCI22
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news...ff9a1d351?sv=92d6483855d8b16adfe1b26eb0eacae8
Where? There is plenty of evidence for that elsewhere in the world, even in New Guinea where there are at least two waves (most PNG people seem to be a later wave than Australian aborigines based on DNA studies), but I am not aware of any GENETIC evidence for it in Australia (i.e. there quite possibly are multiple waves in Australia but not of GENETICALLY distinct people (i.e. differing DNA). I have only found limited studies of DNA done in Australia, so it does not exclude the possibility - but I suspect that any actual genetic evidence is lacking at this time. What I have read seems to indicate one group starting in northern Queensland and spreading out into Australia with time, but DNA differences are small.Goldfreak said:
I have not seen that article - do you know the programme? Genetic markers (alleles etc) are not quite the same thing as being a different people - one can have the same haplogroup (clade) or subclade but contain markers of other people - unless you are African, you like me have about 2% Neanderthal genes - if you have Asian ancestry you might also have up to 6% Denisovan genes, but neither tells much about different waves of people or makes us Neanderthal or Denisovan (although my wife might suspect the former - but the poor old Neanderthals get a bad press). Such markers are often too small a difference to tell us much about waves of movement of peoples, which tends to be at haplogroup and subclade level. I have typical R1a haplogroup but my wife has J - mine is typical of a wave of Middle Eastern people who brought farming into Europe about 10,000 years ago, she is more typical of people who never left the Middle East-Levant (e.g. Jews, Arabs, some North Africans and Iranians). So she and I represent two distinct waves of migration (also, an earlier haplogroup of European hunter-gatherers in Europe from 40,000 years ago were displaced by my R1a mob). R1b tend to be later again (eg Slavic people entering Europe from the east after R1a). African people lack either Neanderthal or Denisovan genes (representing an ultimate source area for all Homo sapiens) and are mostly L from memory that evolved to haplogroups like U and R in the Middle East. A complication is that changes in a haplogroup can represent local factors and not always emigration of peoples (eg one subclade evolved entirely in Europe - H? but entirely from R1a I think - this is all from memory and may contain a few minor errors. People in northern India are a later migration into India of the same Middle Eastern farmers who enteres Europe 10,000 years ago. The Roma ("gypsies") then originated in northwest India and migrated into Iran for a couple of hundred years, moving into Europe 1000 years ago - they were thought in those days to be from Egypt and hence called gypsies, but their DNA and language is from India.Goldfreak said:
"Negrito" people were an early wave that got as close as Indonesia, and were probably followed by the now-Australian aboriginals who moved rapidly from the Middle East about 70,000 years ago through India and also PNG to be established well in Australia by about 50,000 years ago. There are genetically related "negrito" groups in places like Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines. You will often see it said that aborigines are the oldest living group, but that is not strictly true (although they have their own long-lived uniqueness) - not even the oldest living culture (but one of very few). They are probably the oldest continuous living stone-age culture outside Africa (the Khoisan or "Bushmen" who never left Africa are probably the oldest continuous hunter-gatherer culture, and like many other African groups go back hundreds of thousands of years). The aborigines settled in northern Queensland then gradually spread out into Australia with time (fairly rapidly) but I am not aware of diversity in waves at even subclade level. The Papuans (Melanesians) seem to have pushed into PNG from southeast Asia even later, but do not seem to have major penetration into Australia - the Polynesians were the last, starting their spread into the Pacific about 2,000 years ago (possibly the dingo was introduced to the aborigines by them about 2,000 years ago, although the dingo might have come to Australia as long as 5,000 years ago). South-east Asian and perhaps Chinese traders traded with the aborigines but never seem to have settled here for long or left much of a genetic imprint.
I run a 6 week course on human evolution each year but it is simply an overlap into my field of expertise and an interest, not an area of formal training (e.g. I have been involved in trying to date 4 million year old hominin ancestors in Africa when I was an isotope geochemist dating rocks as a branch of geology). - I can't keep up with the DNA literature, most of which has been generated in the last decade (with very little data from Australia, partly because of cultural opposition because of poor experience with European anthropologists in the past). It is quite possible that we will find some evidence of multiple waves into Australia, but I don't know of any evidence yet. There seem to have been early people in the Kimberleys who the present aborigines know little about, and of course these small stature people in Queensland might be distinct - with so little data no representatives of these people might even have been studied yet.
They are now formally known as Homo floriensis and are not the same species as Homo sapiens and we have not evolved from them. They appear to have decreased in size because of environmental factors (a common thing on islands), perhaps evolved from an earlier species of Homo such as those originally known as Java Man and Peking man (I think species Homo robusta but have not checked). Despite being a different species from us, they, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo heidelbergensis, Denisovans (not yet called Homo denisova because we only have some fingerbones not a skeleton) and probably one other hominin species coexisted with us until they progressively died out between 30,000 and 16,000 years ago depending on species. Only we now survive, as the most intelligent species and most dangerous species of any life on Earth.Gunter said:
Indonesia was not connected to Australia by land although it was connected to Southeast Asia. PNG was not connected to Indonesia either but was connected to the Australian mainland, as was Tasmania. However the gap between Indonesia and PNG was so small that the smoke from PNG bushfires would have been visible and there would have been incentive to bind some bamboo poles into a raft and float across (as obviously occurred 50,000 years ago). PNG and Australia and Tasmania only became separate about 10,000 years ago (echidnas and tree kangaroos exist in PNG but there have never been boomerangs or dingos in Tasmania, and the Tasmanian tigers and devils persisted longer in Tasmania because they were protected by Bass Strait).
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