First Footprints

70,000 years ago modern people are confined to Africa. But one tenacious bunch races across Asia and makes the first open-ocean crossing in human history. They encounter Sahul or Greater Australia - a virgin continent full of weird and deadly megafauna, deserts and glaciers. Trade networks soon criss-cross the continent and innovations in art and technology spread rapidly. They engrave the first image of a human face, they make the first maps. Against the odds the first Australians occupy every available niche for our species and thrive. This is the time when creation stories and songlines of Aboriginal cosmology come into being. First Australians today call this The Dreaming. It’s the longest period of social and religious continuity anywhere in the world.

For thousands of years people live with Australia’s strange and ferocious megafauna like the 6 metre giant lizard Megalania and the marsupial lion. These beasts all become extinct as massive climate change hits Australia brought on by the Last Ice Age. Sea levels drop 130m and deserts spread from 60% to 90% of the continent in the biggest drought ever experienced by humans. As conditions worsen, rather than moving, people adapt to the new environments. In many parts they become desert people with new technologies like the grindstone. Over 10,000 years of punishing drought people developed a culture and a Law that enabled them to survive in places we can’t live in today.

Fifteen thousand years ago, melting polar icecaps send 25% of Greater Australia under water. New Guinea and Tasmania are permanently severed. The isolation of Tasmania has profound consequences on diet, language and technology. As regular monsoons come to the north, cultural explosions in art and technology take off. In the Kimberley and Arnhem Land astounding art gives us a detailed insight into life 12,000 years ago. Boomerangs and spear-throwers are invented. As rising seas flood coastal plains, conflict and pitched battles appear in the art. Sydney harbour is formed creating a rich environment where permanent occupation develops.

9,000 years ago agriculture started in different parts of the planet – The Middle East, China and Greater Australia in the Highlands of New Guinea. Agriculture spread to the Torres Strait but not to mainland Australia. Here people carefully manipulated the available natural plants and animals to greatly increase their food resources. In Victoria a huge communal aquaculture system was engineered. Thousands of people lived in stone houses in settled villages. All over Australia fire was used to create habitats that encouraged particular plants and animals. They transformed the continent into the biggest estate on earth, fully sustainable into the future until outsiders arrive. First there were the maccassan traders from Indonesia, then the Dutch and the English who came to stay in 1788.