Clothing and modern human behaviour the challenge from Tasmania

The archaeological record of Australia presents fundamental problems for the concept of modern human behaviour, with Tasmania in particular of ering a special challenge. Evidence from Tasmania exposes these problems and suggests the development of clothing is relevant to key aspects of behavioural modernity. This chapter summarizes the physiology of human cold tolerance and clothing and draws a distinction between “simple” and “complex” clothing. I consider strategies for addressing the archaeological “invisibility” of Palaeolithic clothing and outline the proposed relationships between clothing and markers of modernity (e.g., archaeologically visible adornment). I then argue that the routine lack of clothing in Aboriginal Australia is rel ected in a relative paucity of signs of modernity, while a suite of developments in Late Pleistocene Tasmania can be linked to greater thermal requirements for clothing. Finally, I compare this adaptive pattern of behavioural modernity in Tasmania with similar trends in Africa and Europe and discuss the differing implications of simple and complex clothing. An Afrocentric perspective has replaced earlier Eurocentric views of the emergence of behavioural modernity (McBrearty & Brooks 2000), but an Australocentric perspective questions the whole concept of behavioural modernity as a “package” of traits that accompanied the spread of modern humans out of Africa (Brumm & Moore 2005; O'Connell & Allen 2007; Habgood & Franklin 2008). Anatomically modern humans have been present in Australia for at least 45,000 years (O'Connell & Allen 2004) yet, prior to the mid-Holocene, archaeological evidence of behavioural modernity is distinctly patchy. Furthermore, with the notable exception of Late Pleistocene Tasmania, the few identifiable elements manifest no trend to accumulate into a “package” instead, they occur sporadically and at widely separated times and places around the continent.