this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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chapotraphouse
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Australia had people before western Africa?!
I'm more surprised that the Maori only arrived in New Zealand like a 1000 years ago.
They had to come pretty far and it required quite sophisticated maritime technology
I always compartmentalised the Polynesian triangle expansion as somewhere around 0-400 AD for some reason.
New Zeeland being settled for a shorter time than Iceland just seems strange to me.
There's smaller hops from island to island and the distance is shorter, e.g. here is NZ if it was in the northern hemisphere with the same distance from NZ - Australia depicted as NZ - Scotland
I understand why, but I think of Iceland as a recent venture (relatively speaking). It is a bit like having to recalibrate that Rome never conquered the highlands of Sardinia. There were just guys up there intermittently raiding their settlements for 1000 years.
wait what, really? OH MY GOD COOL, eternal guerillas resisting the great satan?
i think they had an early expansion and then the big one, no?
Around the same time Vikings settled Iceland.
I think a lot of these are very conservative estimates, like the oldest date there is hard evidence for. Like with the coastal travel to the Americas bit, there's a growing body of evidence that would put that at closer to 30 or 40 thousand years ago just because there are sites in the Americas that seem to be that old and "coastal boats" are the best theory since the land bridge was blocked by ice sheets, which would necessarily push back several earlier points in that chain too.
I think the red arrow show people arriving 5,000 years earlier to West Africa than Australia? hard to say, there's no explanation for the yellow numbers, maybe they were cut off with the Americas.
Most of the old world probably already had hominids of one type of another, and for example there was a 210,000 year old homo sapiens skull found in Greece, but we already really know about the successful migrations where humans were able to survive long enough to make a mark - which would have been more likely to occur where there weren't any hominids already (like Australia)