GAE’s main discussion of Tasmania seems to be this paragraph:
Tasmania is a large island in the present day, and it presents the strongest case for genealogical isolation. It was settled tens of thousands of years ago, while it was connected to Australia by a large land bridge that was submerged by rising seas by about fourteen thousand years ago, and difficult to cross by about ten thousand.19 As evidence of this difficulty, dingoes came to Australia four thousand years ago, but to Tasmania much later. There, nonetheless, remain several habitable islands between Tasmania and Australia. Using these islands as a broken bridge, the crossing might still be possible, though difficult, perhaps with the same sort of boats that enabled colonization of Australia in the first place. The real question is if the barriers prevented all mixing. Even if mixing was limited to rare events, universal ancestors arise. For this reason, we cannot know for sure if and when small amounts of migration took place to Tasmania. The oral tradition of Aborigines, to this day, retains ten-millennia-old memories of when the seas rose.20 They would have known that Tasmania existed across the strait, for example, four thousand years ago. It seems reasonable to wonder if at least one boat managed the crossing every century or so. In this case, I grant that skepticism is reasonable, and informed scientists might disagree. We cannot say for sure, nonetheless, one way or another. Future work, however, could settle the question. The remains of dingoes in Tasmania, if dated to 3,000 years ago, for example, would demonstrate there was exchange across the strait. Whole-genome studies of ancient DNA from Tasmanians, also, could demonstrate migration from Australia, perhaps against expectation. Right now, however, evidence does not tell us for sure.
Can I disprove these claims? No. Have I reason to be cautious, and perhaps even skeptical, of them? I think I may have reasons:
- Joshua makes no mention, beyond the assumption that they retained the technology for “the same sort of boats that enabled colonization of Australia in the first place”, of Australian Aboriginal boat-building technology.
- From this, it seems that they did have some technology. “In northern Australia, dug-out canoes are used to travel across open water. Carved from a single log, they are propelled by a square, pandanus sail. In northern Queensland, outriggers are attached to canoes to improve stability.” However in the north you have tropical rainforests for larger, straighter trees, a large number of close islands (e.g. those of the Great Barrier Reef) and calmer seas. In the south, they appear to have had only bark canoes which “primarily, they are used for river travel or for reaching nearby islands.”
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Calling the Bass Strait islands “habitable” is vague, and may be misleading. AFAIK, only one of them, Flinders Island, had ever been inhabited in pre-European times, and that population died out 4,500 years ago (shortly before the Indian influx into mainland Australia).
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Bass Strait is situated in the Roaring Forties, and is described by Wikipedia as:
Like the rest of the waters surrounding Tasmania, and particularly because of its limited depth, it is notoriously rough, with many ships lost there during the 19th century.
- I have not traveled Bass Strait, but I have traveled Foveaux Strait off the south of New Zealand, by boat. Based on that experience, I would suggest that attempting to navigate such waters in a bark canoe would foolhardy in the extreme.
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Given the marginal nature (to say the least) of pre-European navigation of Bass Strait, and the fact that Australian Aboriginals relationship with dingoes has been described as "
commensalism" rather than true domestication, it would seem likely that dingoes were self-introduced to Tasmania rather than than being brought over by bark canoe.
Addendum: it appears that no dingo remains have been found in Tasmania, so it seems that mention of them in the book was purely speculative. -
Although “the oral tradition of Aborigines, to this day, retains ten-millennia-old memories of when the seas rose” it does not follow that “they would have known that Tasmania existed across the strait, for example, four thousand years ago”. That they retained (some) memories does not demonstrate that they retained this specific memory.
