Readers in Canberra may be interested in this talk by Prof. Sue O’Connor for this year’s Mulvaney Lecture on 3 November 2022. Registration required.
Our species embarked on the world’s first great maritime journey from Sunda (greater Southeast Asia) to Sahul (Australia and New Guinea) at least 50,000 years ago. In the process they settled Wallacea, the archipelago of thousands of islands lying between these two continental landmasses.
Registration here: https://archanth.cass.anu.edu.au/events/mulvaney-lecture-2022-modern-humans-pleistocene-wallacea-story-thus-far
By ~45,000 years ago they had occupied the larger islands, from Sulawesi to Flores and Timor. It appears that these societies were stable for about 30,000 years but at the end of the last glacial phase ~16,000 years ago things changed dramatically.
Obsidian from an off-island source appears in the archaeological assemblages of at least four islands in southern Wallacea marking the onset of the world’s earliest maritime exchange network and a period of extensive demographic movement across Wallacea.
This lecture explores the archaeological and genetic evidence for this remarkable human story thus far.
