Australian Deserts: Extreme Environments in Archaeology

The first Australians passed through biogeographic filters of the increasingly depauperate islands of Wallacea to enter the most arid continent ever occupied by preindustrial era humans. But were Australias deserts marginal, extreme, and risky environments for these hyper-adaptive modern humans? We must recall that they were part of a fast track southern diaspora of modern humans from Africa to Australia who had already shown extraordinarily adaptive abilities. Given that the Last Glacial Maximum expanded Australias deserts even further and made for some truly extreme environments, what does archaeology tell us of how Ice Age Australians dealt with the most common environments in Sahul? By the time Europeans arrived in Australia, the deserts were more densely packed with people than ever before, a process that had escalated in the late Holocene to create the renowned desert societies known to et ...