Introduction

The previous five chapters of this book described processes leading to the entry of people into Australia and the impact of those people on the animals and the landscape. The discussion included growth of world population during the last 1 My, the methods and pattern of migration, demographic and genetic processes leading to the arrival of people in Australia and the environmental setting and possible consequences of their arrival. I now want to examine who these first Australians were and where they came from. Whatever the world's population was doing at that time and whoever it was that undertook these migrations across the globe, Australia was at the receiving end of the I have already hinted at the possible genetic complexities that could arise from migrations moving through South East Asia and Indonesia and how difficult these could make sorting out the ‘origins’ of the first Australians. This difficulty is compounded further when we consider the extremely limited fossil sample available in Australia and the fact that it may be too young to be of any real help to us.

The claim that widely differing populations arrived in Australia is not guesswork, the fossil record demonstrates this emphatically.