Breaking down barriers: Prehistoric species dispersals across Island Southeast Asia, New Guinea and Australia

Abstract

The Holocene histories of Island Southeast Asia, New Guinea and Australia have often been portrayed in terms of clear regional distinctions. Each region had a distinctive character or signature: the maritime landscapes of Island Southeast Asia were widely inhabited by hunter-gatherer-fisher communities prior to colonisation by Austronesian language-speaking farmer-voyagers ultimately derived from Taiwan, the island of New Guinea was a place of early and independent agricultural development and plant domestication, whereas Australia was the continent of hunter-gatherers until settlement by Europeans within the last 250 years. A consideration of new multidisciplinary data challenges these regional (mis)conceptions, which are heavily based on isolationist and essentialist characterisations of long-term history. Human-aided dispersals of animal and plant species shed an increasing light on the socio-spatial inter-connections between the people who inhabited these regions. Show more