265. Tasmania
Tasmania is situated toward Australia as Australia is toward Asia-Oceania. It constitutes an ultimate periphery. Of what little culture Australia had received from the remainder of the hemisphere, Tasmania again received only a part. The prevailing opinion that the Tasmanians were the most primitive of recent peoples is therefore probably justified. They lacked everything that the Australians lacked; and in addition lacked spear-throwers, boomerangs, shields, and ground stone tools. They are the one population among whom it seems reasonably certain that a culture of Palæolithic type was preserved unmixed until modern times. They had chipped knives, axes, scrapers, and similar tools; wooden spears and clubs; bark rafts; windbreak huts; cordage and baskets; paint; ornaments of bone and other animal parts. Unfortunately the Tasmanians numbered only a few thousands, died rapidly on contact with civilization, and became extinct in the nineteenth century before scientific study of their culture or speech had been made. Their religion and society therefore perished almost unrecorded. Their racial type is preserved in skeletal material and photographs. It is clear that it differed from that of the Australians. Their hair was woolly. They have consequently sometimes been reckoned as Oceanic Negroes rather than as an Australian sub-type. It is likely that they represent the first human strain to enter Australia, which was later absorbed or exterminated on that continent by the Australians, surviving only in the protected island of Tasmania.