In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

99 8 Domesticates in Oceania Oceania is a geographical region that includes the continents of Australia and New Zealand as well as Papua New Guinea and a very large number of smaller islands across the Pacific Ocean, as shown figure 48. With acceptance of the theory that the first anatomically modern humans moved out of Africa about 200,000 years ago, most anthropologists now agree that these first humans then traveled through Asia and India, keeping to the coasts, until they reached East Asia about 70,000 years ago. Sea levels were lower at this time, which is termed the Lower Pleniglacial, when the north was covered in thick ice sheets and there were land bridges between Southeast Asia, New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania. It is not surprising, therefore, that the earliest evidence of these first humans has been found in Australia dating to around 55,000 years ago, many thousands of years before the remains of anatomically modern humans have been found in Europe. Figure 48. Map of Oceania. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.) 100| Chapter 8 As Manfred Kayser has pointed out in a recent review, human migration into the lands of Oceania is unique in that it encompasses evidence for both the first out-of-Africa expansion of anatomically modern humans to New Guinea and Australia as well as the latest occupation of some Polynesian islands. New Guinea has other anthropological peculiarities, which include the 1,000 often very distinct languages, the independent and early development of agriculture in the highlands about 10,000 years ago, and the long-term isolation of the interior of New Guinea, which lasted until the 1930s.1 There is also the intriguing problem of the origin of the tiny hominins whose remains have been found on the Indonesian island of Flores, where they lived with pygmy elephants (stegodon ) and komodo dragons from about 95,000 to 13,000 years ago. These miniature persons, only three feet tall, may be a separate species of human and have been given the provisional name of Homo floresiensis, although their small size may just be the result of island dwarfing, as with the fossil elephants.2 Between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, as in the north with the melting of the ice and worldwide rising sea levels, lands in the Pacific became separated as islands from each other. Australia was cut off from New Guinea, as was Tasmania from the south of Australia, but by this time humans had learned how to travel by boat, taking live animals with them. An archaeozoolgical peculiarity of ancient Oceania is that the only domestic animals that were ever taken to the islands, including New Guinea and Australia, were dogs, pigs, and chickens, with rats as commensals. Susan Bulmer has cited evidence for pig remains dated to 8,000 years ago on the island of New Ireland in the Bismarck Archipelago, but no direct evidence for dogs this early, although it is hard to believe they did not reach the islands at the same time as pigs.3 It is curious, however, that there is no evidence that the people who took the first dogs to Australia also took pigs. Perhaps they did, but perhaps as hunter-gatherers and fisherfolk they found no use for pigs, and the arid climate inland prevented pigs from reproducing as populations in the wild. The dogs, on the other hand, became such successful wild carnivores that there is a case for classifying them as Canis dingo, a separate species from the domestic dog, Canis familiaris. DOGS IN ANCIENT OCEANIA New Guinea Singing Dog The first island of Oceania to which dogs were taken may have been New Guinea, and together with pigs, their function could have been to help with hunting, but also to provide meat, hides, and fur in a land that was dominated by wild birds: the beautiful and unique birds of paradise. It may be assumed that the dogs spread rapidly into the forests and bred as wild populations. Subjected to natural selection in the high-altitude mountains and forest environment , they evolved into a distinct morphological type with the tawny-yellow coat of the dingo and the singing howl, which carried over great distances and held the packs together. The earliest positive ancient evidence for dogs in the New Guinea Highlands comes from hunting shelters dated 6,000–5,000 years ago.4 The survival of this ancient breed of dogs in the New Guinea Highlands, which appeared to...

Share