Far East Kingdoms

Early Australasia (Oceania)

Palaeolithic Cultures Early Africa (Intro) Early Americas (Intro) Early Asia (Intro) Early China (Intro) Early Europe (Intro) Early Near East (Intro) Early Oceania (Intro)

The system which has evolved to catalogue the various archaeological expressions of human progress is one which involves cultures. For well over a century, archaeological cultures have remained the framework for global prehistory. The earliest cultures which emerge from Africa and the Near East are perhaps the easiest to catalogue, right up until human expansion reaches the Americas. The task of cataloguing that vast range of human cultures is covered in the related feature (see link, right).

Considered in some quarters to be a continent in its own right, one which is largely composed of water rather than land, Oceania starts where South-East Asia ends. The territory which forms Oceania is somewhat debatable however, as is that potential status as a continent.

Broadly it encompasses Australasia (Australia, New Zealand, and some minor islands), Melanesia (neighbouring Australasia to the north and east, and incorporating islands between New Guinea and Tonga), Micronesia (on the northern flank of Melanesia and east of the Philippines, and incorporating thousands of islands which stretch up to Japan's Bonin Islands), and Polynesia (on the eastern flank of all three of the others, and stretching north to include Hawaii, east to Easter Island, and south-west towards New Zealand).

Occupation of Oceania by anatomically modern humans has been something of an on-off process. The Toalean people were related to the very earliest modern human populations in the Wallacea region from around 63,000 BC or earlier. These were the ancestors of indigenous Australians and Papuans.

At some point they were joined by an East Asian influx. This seems to have taken place after the Australian/Papuan outwards migration and the initial peopling of the Pleistocene supercontinent of Sahul, but before general Austronesian expansion. The Toalean was eventually edged out a thousand years or so after the start of the spread of Austronesian Neolithic farmers from mainland Asia.

The first humans reached Australia at some point before 50,000 BC (see feature link, and the timeline below). That early Australian population, if it left any related communities in South-East Asia, quickly lost connection with them and they were replaced outside of Australia by populations of later South Asians and East Asians.

Archaeological finds are constantly being made, and archaeological cultures are frequently being updated with new information. Get in touch here if this page also requires updating.

(Information by Peter Kessler & John De Cleene, with additional information from Hammond's Historical Atlas (C S Hammond & Co, 1963), from Investigating Archaeological Cultures: Material Culture, Variability, and Transmission, Benjamin W Roberts & Marc Vander Linden (Eds), from The Lapita Peoples, P V Kirch (Blackwell, 1997), and from External Links: A Brief History (New Zealand Immigration Office), and Cook Islands, New Zealand, and Niue (Flags of the World), and History (Te Ara - The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand), and Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750-1940, Bronwen Douglas & Chris Ballard (ANU Press, 2008, and available via JSTOR), and Sequencing Uncovers a 9,000 Mile Walkabout, Dr Morten Rasmussen (University of Copenhagen, 2012, available to download as a PDF via Illimina), and From Sunda to Sahul, Nicholas Thomas (Excerpts from the author's Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific, Head of Zeus, 2021), and Australia's 1,400-year-old Mysterious Earth Rings (Arkeonews), and Australian stories tell of ancient climate change (Archaeo News), and 'Oldest axe' was made by early Australians (BBC News), and New date for Indigenous occupation in Australia (Bradshaw Foundation), and Humans first settled in Australia as early as 65,000 years ago (ScienceNews).)

c.60,000 BC

Some areas of Oceania and Australasia, such as the islands of Wallacea through which anatomically modern humans must travel to reach Australasia, are still to be extensively investigated.

Archaeologists in Australia in 2017 unearthed the world's latest find of 'oldest ever' polished axe heads, one of which is seen here (left to right) from the top, from the side, and from underneath

Archaeological research across the wider region has still advanced dramatically though, and dates are available for sites across what are now the separate landmasses of New Guinea and Australia, as well as the Bismarck Archipelago which extends to the north-east of Papua.

The earliest dates for northern Australia suggest that human settlement may take place around or even before 60,000 BC (and perhaps by 65,000 BC), but the accuracy of such dates has been extensively debated. There is a greater density of archaeological sites for the period between 50,000-45,000 BC so, if humans do arrive before that, they most likely do so in very small numbers.

c.50,000 BC

Australia's earliest-known site of human occupation (as of 2017) is along its coast, specifically in a remote cave in Western Australia. Evidence of inhabitation exists on Barrow Island in the country's north-west, with charcoal, animal remains, and ancient artefacts being found to confirm hunter-gatherer occupation.

In AD 1500 Pedro Alvares Cabral found a rich and sometimes dangerous South American land which was ripe for colonisation - this would become the Portuguese imperial colony of Brazil

The dimensions of prehistoric skulls which are found by archaeologists in Brazil match those of the aboriginal peoples of Australia and Melanesia (see feature link). The site is at Serra Da Capivara in remote north-eastern Brazil, where cave paintings provide the first clue to the existence of these people in the early Americas. They could reach South America as far back as 50,000 BC, with their arrival most likely due to their ocean-going vessel being blown off course.

c.47,000 BC

A tiny stone fragment is all that has been found of the earliest-known axe with handle, in north-western Australia. The fingernail-sized sliver of basalt is ground smooth at one end and appears to date from between 47,000-42,000 BC. It is confirmed as a chip from a human-made hand axe.

Although much older 'hand axes', usually flint, have been found across Europe and Africa, this tool and later Australian versions of it are very different. Axe blades which have been produced from this harder stone have painstakingly been battered into blades.

The evidence for the early Australian hand axe is a small piece of basalt which is eleven millimetres long, while the top of the fragment has been meticulously smoothed, with the find being made in the 1990s in Windjana Gorge National Park, Western Australia

Such axes do not appear in the archaeological record to the north of north-western Australia, and neither do they appear within Australia outside of the tropical north. These axes are invented in Australia itself, and only by one or more groups in the north.

c.40,000 BC

A re-examination in 2002 of the so-called Mungo Man skeleton, which had been unearthed in Australia in 1974, produces a probable burial date of 40,000 BC, with humans having lived in the area for some ten thousand years prior to that.

c.10,600 BC

An early European settler in Australia later relates stories which are told to him by indigenous Australians. They describe a time at which the north-eastern Australian shoreline reaches up to the Great Barrier Reef, recalling a river which flows into the sea at what is now Fitzroy Island, near the city of Cairns.

The large gulf between today's shoreline and the reef suggests that the stories tell of a time at which the seas are more than sixty metres lower than they are today, thereby placing the story's roots as far back as 10,600 BC.

Mungo Man, named for what had been the lush Lake Mungo lagoon which was teeming with fish and water birds until about 18,000 BC, is Australia's oldest find to date of human remains

c.9650 BC

It can be said that is this the crossover period between Palaeolithic Oceania and Neolithic Oceania, apparently without a defined Mesolithic period in-between (the same transition is largely true of the Near East, but dating for Oceania is notoriously difficult to pin down, largely due to a lack of archaeological exploration and the massive reduction in exposed land masses).

c.6900 - 5500 BC

With global water levels continuing to rise following the ending of the most recent ice age, the Sahul landmass of Australasia is gradually submerged along its lower levels. The land bridge between it and the South-East Asian Sunda landmass disappears under the water after modern humans have already long since inhabited the palaeo-continent. Now New Guinea is separated from Australia (Tasmania is separated around 4000 BC).

Further memories gleaned by Europeans from indigenous Australians describe a time in which three islands off the south-west coast, near Perth, 'formed part of the mainland, and that the intervening ground was thickly covered with trees'.

Indigenous Australians maintained an oral tradition which could recall the later stages of post-ice age sea-level rise, with those sea levels not fully balancing out until about 5000 BC

In one story those trees catch fire and burn 'with such intensity that the ground split asunder with a great noise, and the sea rushed in between, cutting off these islands from the mainland'. Modern researchers have matched this and other indigenous Australian stories to real events. The sea does rush in at the end of the most recent glacial period, between about 6900-5500 BC.

AD 600 - 1435

The Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung country in the Sunbury hills at the fringe of Australia's Melbourne is home to 'earth rings'. These are the product of many centuries of human endeavour, with them excavating and heaping together earth in a large circle (or circles) which measure up to hundreds of metres in diameter.

The ancestral Woi-wurrung-speaking people prepare plants and animals here, make and use stone tools, make decorations out of feathers, light campfires, and perform rituals such as scarifying human skin.

The archaeological and cultural interpretation of Australian earth rings such as that at Sunbury is now woven together in first-of-its-kind research which was carried out by the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people themselves