In 1987, Greenberg’s Stanford colleague, Merritt Ruhlen, classified Australian mainland Aboriginal languages in a way that bore some similarities to a different aspect of the trihybrid theory. In his massive, three-volume study, A Guide to the World’s Languages, Ruhlen made a broad division between the Pama-Nyungan subgroup, which is found in the east, south and west of the Australian mainland, and the non-Pama-Nyungan languages of northern and northwestern Australia. At least two reviews of the literature in the past decade have observed that this partition corresponds, very roughly, to Tindale and Birdsell’s division between the more recently arrived northerners, the Carpentarians, and the older indigenous people, the Murrayians.
Moreover, one of these reviews by Peter Bellwood of the Australian National University points out that there is a correlation between this linguistic divide and a “veritable efflorescence” of innovative stone tool technology in the north of the continent about 6000 years ago. The dingo, originally a hunting dog, appears to have arrived at about the same time. Bellwood comments:
There are both linguistic and biological data which could indicate the arrival of new populations in Australia during the Holocene [the last 10,000 years], and the evidence of these microlithic tools in Australia may point towards the same conclusion.
In other words, the evidence connecting linguistics, stone tools and migration provides some circumstantial support to the trihybrid thesis.
On its own, however, the field of linguistics is unlikely to shed a great deal of light on this issue. One of the leading paleo-linguists, Johanna Nichols, says language relationships are difficult to trace beyond 8000 years of separate evolution. Since habitation and population divergence in Australia long precedes this date, linguistic evidence is unlikely to resolve the problem of Australian origins either way.
Human evolution: As we have noted, the supporters of the “one people” thesis characteristically explain away any differences found within the Aboriginal population in terms of local evolution. For instance, the Tasmanians had frizzy hair rather than the wavy variety that prevailed on the mainland, so this must have evolved locally after the Tasmanians were separated from the rest of the population when Bass Strait formed about 8000 years ago.
From the 1940s until the 1960s, it was fairly widely known there were pygmies in Australia. They lived in North Queensland and had come in from the wild of the tropical rainforests to live on missions in the region. This was a fact recorded at the time not only in anthropological textbooks and articles but also in popular books about the Australian Aborigines. There was even an award-winning children’s book tracing their origins. The more famous photographs of the Australian pygmies were reproduced in both the academic and the popular literature.
At the time, there was controversy about their origins but not over the fact of their existence. In 1962, the first volume of Manning Clark’s History of Australia recorded their presence on its first two pages and repeated the then influential anthropological theory about their origins and their place in the waves of migration of hunter-gatherer peoples from Asia who populated the Australian continent in the millennia before the British arrived in 1788.
Yet, since then, the Australian pygmies have been totally obliterated from public memory. To test just how complete this process has been, over recent months we have questioned a wide range of friends and acquaintances. Although most were well-educated and well-read people, none had ever heard of the pygmies, not even when we used some of their other, once-familiar alternative names such as “Negritos” and “Barrineans”. A few friends scoffed at the notion and demanded some evidence. They wouldn’t believe us until we emailed them the photographs.
The Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia (1994), published by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, today does its best to disguise these people. It lists some of their tribes, including the Djabuganjdji, Mbarbaram (Barbaram) and Yidinjdji (Indindji), but does not mention a word about their stature. Only its entry “Rainforest Region” records the existence of
Birdsell & Pygmy“small, curly-haired people with languages which have distinctive features”, but the accompanying photograph of Yidinjdji tribesmen taken in 1893 does not give any scale or point of comparison to show that these adult males were only about 140 centimeters (four feet six inches) tall.
Joseph Birdsell, height 186 centimetres (six feet one inch), with twenty-four-year-old male of the Kongkandji tribe, height 140 centimetres (four feet six inches). The photograph was taken at Mona Mona Mission, near Kuranda, North Queensland, in 1938.
One of the major mtDNA studies was done in 1989 on the populations of the Pacific region. It was made by two of the leading pioneers of DNA research, Mark Stoneking and Allan Wilson, then of the University of California, Berkeley, who were the authors of the now famous study that found our oldest modern human ancestor, the 200,000 year-old African woman, “Mitochondrial Eve”. Their Pacific study included data from 21 Aboriginal Australians from four regions: Alice Springs, Darwin, Perth and the Broome-Derby area. It found that mtDNA types were not shared between different regions of Australia and that the distribution of mtDNA types in Australia was diverse, just like on other continents. The most likely explanation, Stoneking and Wilson argued, was that “the populations that colonized each continent (including Australia) consisted of more than one mtDNA type.” In other words, the Aboriginal population was not homogenous.
In fact, Stoneking and Wilson said their work showed that at least 15 different mtDNA lineages colonized Australia. They said this confirmed an earlier study of Aboriginal Australians done in 1987 with a smaller sample, which found seven different mtDNA lineages. The authors acknowledged the smallness of their sample but argued that a bigger size would only increase the number of different lineages to be found. “Probably the most important insight to date,” they summarized, “is that relatively many females were involved in the colonization of Australia and Papua New Guinea.” Stoneking and Wilson were heavily sarcastic about the “one people” thesis:
It has been proposed that Australia may have been colonized by a very small number of females, perhaps even by a single pregnant female who floated to Australia on a log. The mtDNA results contradict this assertion; there must have been at least 15 pregnant females that floated across!
In his last book in 1993, Birdsell predicted that a crucial test of his theory would be a comparison of the mitochondrial lineages of the populations of New Guinea and Aboriginal Australia, especially if descendants of the Cairns rainforest people and Tasmanians were included. While there has not been research that has specifically included these last two groups, there was a study in 1999 that went some of the way towards testing the hypothesis. It was conducted by Mark Stoneking, now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, and Alan Redd, an anthropologist from Pensylvania State University.
This time, their mtDNA analysis was done on a larger population of 319. Samples were taken from Australian Aborigines and people from the highlands and coastal regions of Papua New Guinea. The Aborigines comprised 105 individuals from northwest Australia (Great Sandy Desert and Kimberley regions) and 95 from Arnhem Land.
The study found there was a great evolutionary gap between the Aborigines and the New Guinea highlanders. It showed that the Aborigines of the north and northwest were comparatively recent arrivals and derived from the same ancestral population as the people of southern India. The New Guinea highlanders, however, had a completely different and much older ancestry. The highlanders, in fact, still retained some genetic links direct with Africa. Stoneking and Redd went out of their way to point out that this pattern fitted the mode of settlement of ancient Australia proposed by Tindale and Birdsell:
These findings are somewhat consistent with Birdsell’s trihybrid model for the peopling ofSahul [ancient Greater Australia], a model that is based on morphological variation . Birdsell hypothesized that Oceanic “Negritos” first populated Sahul, but that two later migrations replaced most of them in Australia but not in the Cairns area of northeast Queensland or in Tasmania and New Guinea… The gene tree in the present study shows that the PNG3 cluster shares sites with African sequences, a finding that may be consistent with Birdsell’s first-migration hypothesis. Our results also suggest that there may have been a migration(s) from an Indian source that reached Australia but not PNG.
However, they went on to argue that, while these findings were consistent with the Negrito hypothesis, they could not find two separate migratory groups that would confirm the distinction between the Murrayians and Carpentarians. Although their study again found multiple migrations in the peopling of Sahul, there was no mtDNA distinction between the Aborigines they tested from northwest Australia and those from Arnhem Land. Rather, both types showed an ancestry that, although from substantially mixed populations, had links with the Hindu castes of southern India. Nonetheless, this research still left much of Tindale and Birdsell’s original theory intact. It found some correlation between their morphological observations and the genetic evidence. There was a strong connection between the people of India and northern Australia and there was still the possibility of an ancient Negrito migration all the way from Africa to Tasmania.
No one today with a lay interest in Aboriginal anthropology, and few of those doing introductory courses in the subject, becuase vested interests doesn’t want to findout the truth about original in habitants of Australia, if anyone findout aborinals arrived later then whole myths and dreamtime stories are nullfied.
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