CHAPTER IX
LIKELY ORIGIN OF THE AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL
Deductions theoretical—Pre-historic men of Australia—Tennant’s Creek calvarium—Talgai skull—Other finds—Alterations in world’s ancient geography—Former land-bridges—Probable home of man in region now occupied by Indian Ocean—Early migrations—Three principal strains—Negroid—Mongoloid—Australoid—Tremendous upheavals at close of Triassic Period—Australia isolated—Early inhabitants unmolested—Primitive Australian anthropologically related to cultured Caucasian—Survival of the Stone Age in Australia—Living fossils—Short resumé—The mixing of European with aboriginal blood—What is a half-caste?
Having satisfied ourselves in regard to some of the principal somatic characteristics of the Australian aboriginal, we shall proceed to discuss briefly his likely origin. In the present absence of more material facts relating to his ancestry, and of a more thorough comparative knowledge of races in general, we are lamentably handicapped in this direction, and many of our conclusions are necessarily theoretical.
So far as possible, we shall take into consideration his present relationships to other living races and peoples, as well as his affinities with the ancient hunting peoples, who inhabited various parts of the world in bygone eras, and are now only known in a fossilized condition.
This introduces the geological element of time—hundreds of thousands, yea, millions perhaps, of years have passed since man left records of his being; definite traces have been found, embedded in the same deposits as contain the mammoth, on the one hand, and the Diprotodon, on the other.
The evidences of pre-historic and fossil men in the Old World are too numerous and well-known to need elucidation here; we shall confine our attention to Australian records.
Some years ago a specimen was submitted to me for identification which had been found in Pleistocene (or Pliocene?) gravels S.S.E. of the Tennant’s Creek district. It was so completely petrified and “stony” looking that the organic origin was doubted, but a thin section viewed under the microscope revealed the true structure of bone. After cleaning the fragment thoroughly, I recognized it as portion of a human skull, viz. the posterior half of the left parietal. The anterior fracture is vertical and at about the centre of the parietal eminence; the thin squamous edge is also broken away. The lambdoidal border is still quite characteristic and shows the complex nature of the parieto-occipital suture. Both the external and internal surfaces are rough and pitted through exposure, age, and mineral precipitations, but the temporal ridge is still discernible and can be traced posteriorly right up to the parieto-occipital suture. There is no indication of a parietal foramen. The bone is thick about the posterior inferior angle, but the groove of the lateral sinus has broken away. The specimen, when struck, has a clear metallic ring, like that of earthenware or porcelain. When treated with acid, the surfaces as well as the “bone-substance” effervesced briskly, proving that a thorough intermolecular substitution of organic matter by mineral was in progress. This calvarium, fragmentary though it is, is of considerable importance from a prehistory point of view, since it gives us another definite link in the somewhat meagre chain of evidence which has been established in connection with the geological antiquity of man in Australia.
The most important find of an extinct Australian type was made at Talgai, in south-eastern Queensland, as far back as 1884, in the shape of a fairly well preserved skull; but it was not until a few years ago that a description of it was published by Dr. S. A. Smith. Although no other bones were discovered in association with the skull, numerous remains of extinct creatures like the Diprotodon, the Nototherium, and horny reptiles have been unearthed not many miles remote from the site of the interesting discovery. Dr. Smith sums up his observations as follows: “This fossil human skull of a not yet adult Proto-Australian presents the general picture of a cranium similar in all respects to the cranium of the Australian of to-day, combined with a facial skeleton of undoubtedly Australian type, in the palate and teeth of which there are to be found, in conjunction with the most primitive characters found in modern skulls, certain characters more ape-like than have been observed in any living or extinct race, except that of Eoanthropus.”
Other less convincing discoveries have been recorded in the shape of human and dingo bones from the Wellington Caves, human remains and artefacts from beneath the basalts of Victoria, and the fossil footprints of an aboriginal in the upper Tertiary beds of Warrnambool.