How did the Aboriginals survive in Australia?

The age of colonization began in Europe during the early 1500s and saw thousands of ships traveling around the globe looking for new lands and treasures, in 1606 a Dutch explorer named Willem Janszoon was the first European to reach the continent of Australia. As with most countries someone else reached, Australia already had its own native population, and these people became known as the Aboriginal Australians. They had seemingly lived in the country for a very long time before anyone else turned up, but who were they and how did they survive in such a harsh environment?

Who are Aboriginal Australians?

Aboriginal is the name given to the people who inhabited Australia before anyone from Europe arrived. They had several main languages and called themselves by different names, but collectively became known as the Aboriginal people of Australia and are recognized as being the first people to arrive in the country. This group is actually the oldest living unaltered civilization on earth and hasn’t had any major changes to their DNA since first arriving in the country between 65,000 and 75,000 years ago.

Where did Aboriginals come from and how did they get to Australia?

It is widely believed that humans, as we know them today, appeared in modern-day Africa almost 300,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until around 50,000 years ago that our brains evolved and we stopped being so animalistic. During this time the seas were frozen in huge glaciers up to 2 miles thick over the northern hemisphere, and the sea levels were much lower, allowing for many land bridges and connections that don’t exist today.

When people first left Africa and started to travel around the world, they did so in separate groups and some of these people later split from the main groups and headed into different areas. Many people in Southeast Asia share much of the same DNA, and so do most of the Middle Eastern countries, but whoever the Aboriginals split from is unknown. It’s most likely that the people who first settled in Australia just kept going after they left Africa and after possibly hundreds of years of traveling in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, they finally reached Australia.

One of the main problems with this theory is how they made it to the Australian continent

The above map shows the most widely accepted estimation of the world’s sea levels 50,000 years ago. This map is based on how much water we know was frozen over the northern hemisphere and the resulting drop in sea levels, but as you can see from the map, there is still a large channel that spans across the northern coast of Australia. The problem with this is that boat technology has been very bad up until the last few hundred years, and even the Romans 2000 years ago would regularly lose ships on the 70-mile crossing from France to England, and they were the most advanced civilization 2000 years ago, so how did Aboriginal people do it tens of thousands of years ago?

The closest estimated gap is just over 50 miles, which is a short distance for a ship in today’s terms but would be close to impossible for such primitive people to build ships capable of transporting so many safely across. As for when this all happened, the most commonly agreed-upon estimate for when Aboriginals first arrived is between 65,000 and 75,000 years ago, but some estimates put it as soon as 45,000 years ago. There is the possibility that during the earlier arrival estimates, there was a small land bridge or even a giant sand bank that has long since washed away, but the most likely explanation for how they arrived on the continent would be from simply walking there.

How did Aboriginals survive in Australia?

When people first arrived here they found themselves in a huge empty country packed with wild animals and tropical fruit and had no reason to abandon the hunter-gatherer lifestyle they were used to. There are 3 main areas of climate in the country which are arid, temperate, and a tropical area in the northeast, each of which comes with its own plants and animals.

Food would have included fish and shellfish in all of the inhabited areas, as all kinds of early people stayed close to the coast. Red meat animals like kangaroos, turtles, possums, and emus would have been hunted and added to a wide range of seeds and nuts. The Aboriginals are known for creating a type of bread called damper that’s made of various ground-up seeds and roots which are formed into small cakes and baked over hot coals.

Aboriginal homes

Due to the extremely hot and tropical climate, homes were built according to the weather and the materials available. The most common type of home was the roundhouse, but they were very different from the classic Celtic style constructions, with their frames being made by bending whole branches over and sealing each end in the ground, or tying lots of sticks together to make the frame.

(An Aboriginal home in one of the wetter areas of the country, covered in thick grass to stop tropical downpours)

Thatching was always done with large leaves, grass, reeds, or bark, but was put on as more of a general covering than to protect from rain, and the sides of aboriginal homes were often very thin. The circular design was not only done out of practicality but also allowed for a central fire pit which provided maximum heat on those rare cold Australian days.

Aboriginals occupied several main areas of the country and built their homes accordingly. In the northeast of the country is a large tropical zone where it’s not uncommon to see frequent rain, and in these areas, aboriginal homes tend to be thatched with long grass in much thicker layers to keep the water out. In the arid areas of the country, aboriginal homes were often much smaller and the walls were built for the sole purpose of privacy and to keep the wind out.