Dinner with a Cannibal: The Complete History of Mankind's Oldest Taboo (NONE) by Christy G Turner Carole A Travis-Henikoff

Author:Christy G Turner Carole A Travis-Henikoff [Carole A Travis-Henikoff, Christy G Turner]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Santa Monica Press
Published: 2008-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THROUGH A DISTANT WINDOW

“ … then hot gum leaves are pressed on the bridge of the baby’s nose, to make it flat, for a thoroughly flat nose is essential to good looks.”1 From our most ancient past into the present, we humans have looked after our appearance.

Some 60,000 years ago a group of people crossed unknown waters to land on the island continent of Australia. At the time of their journey, Australia, the three Americas and many of the Pacific Islands were devoid of human footprints. Genetics suggest the group originated in southern India, but the evidence is inconclusive. If correct, those early explorers would have had to cross the northern portion of the Indian Ocean to reach the Andaman Islands, then travel down the curving length of islands currently known as Indonesia. Or, they could have skirted the entire coastline of the Bay of Bengal, which runs for thousands of miles in a huge inverted V and then crossed over to the Indonesian islands. Whichever course they took, they had to face expanses of open waters when they reached the Timor Sea or the Torres Strait. If they made it all the way to New Guinea, they would have crossed the Torres Strait, but the Lesser Sunda Islands are closer to their proposed starting point and look more promising on maps of today; a few minutes with a good atlas should stir the imagination. Those intrepid people were the ancestors of Australia’s Aborigines and represent the oldest known seafarers in sapient history.

The original people of Australia made their heroic journey during the last ice age, an extreme cold-weather snap that waffled over a span of 100,000 years. Warmer weather brought a rather abrupt end to the Ice Age some 10,000 years ago, causing sea levels to rise dramatically as during the Ice Age so much of the earth’s water was tied up in continental ice sheets that the world’s oceans dropped 300 to 400 feet. With such spectacular drops in sea level, many expanses of water were narrowed dramatically exposing new lands and shorelines. During millennia of maximum glaciation, the weather was milder, making the seas calmer than those of today. Heat drives wind, wind produces surface currents and weather, so when a planet cools there is less air turbulence, fewer storms, less wind and calmer seas. At such times, early man on makeshift rafts of bamboo or wood—or possibly seagoing canoes joined together—could have journeyed to far places, which might have been impossible if distances and weather patterns had been such as those we know today.

Those courageous seafarers of long ago landed on the shores of a harsh, beautiful and varied land inhabited by plants and animals, most of which differed from those they had known previously. Over the following millennia the first Australians developed unique cultures and ate a majority of the larger fauna to extinction, much as the first Americans would do thousands of years later. Scientific studies echo Aboriginal myths that speak of coming

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.