First Footprints by Scott Cane

Author:Scott Cane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS004000, book
ISBN: 9781743435724
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2013-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

A proud father, and embarrassed children, at home. Life in a windbreak is surprisingly snug and sociable, protected from the wind next to a soft glowing fire. The father’s spears and spear-thrower are at hand in the windbreak.

And, perhaps fittingly, there is a rare opportunity in this coastal land to obtain a sense of the people themselves. There is an ancient burial in a sea cave on King Island. The cave now has a spectacular view of the sea but at the time it looked over a cold, treeless plain. King Island was then a large hill and the cave was perched in a cliff on the side of a raised plateau. The burial is 18,000 years old.181 It is not clear how the person died, but after death the body was laid on its right side and left exposed for some time. The bones then appear to have been gathered together into a pile. Small pieces of ochre are attached to the skull and the thighs, suggesting the person either had ochre on them or the ochre was brought in later and placed with the body. Once the burial mound was constructed the cave was vacated. There is no other evidence of human presence, no artefacts or food debris of any kind.

The person was a male between 25 and 35 years old with a large muscular face. He is the most southern representative of the nomads at the end of the Pleistocene. His burial implies ritual attendance. The ochre suggests personal adornment and considered mortuary rites. The lack of accompanying or subsequent cultural material suggests the cave was a mausoleum, a place for the dead. There is a sense of place and purpose in the lives of these people of the past.

The burial captures the life of an ice age man at the peak of the ice age in greater Australia. He might be seen to represent the social and geographic achievements of all the nomads who lived throughout the era and whose lives are etched with such remarkable diversity across the land. We see in his death much that we see repeatedly across the ages and across the continent: a viable people in varied environments linked through shared traditions and common ideology, who survived in extreme environments through testing times. There is artistic achievement and social development through deep history enriched with notable creativity, technical innovation and diversified subsistence. These were people who changed the environment they lived in and left their mark accordingly. They were great and successful colonisers who adapted to the deserts, mountains, plains and coasts with erudite diversification. The nomads of Australia had settled extreme environments and adapted to extreme conditions. And, as they mastered the difficulties that confronted them, the world they knew changed dramatically once again.

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.