The First Boat People

Challenging current theories of how modern humans emerged, this book explores how people travelled from Africa to Australia in the Pleistocene.

S. G. Webb (Author)

9780521856560, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 June 2006

338 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.658 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Steve Webb is an excellent expert of the Australian Biological Anthropology. The First Boat People concerns how people travelled across the world to Australia. It traces movements from Africa to Australia, offering a new view of population growth at that time, challenging current ideas and underscoring problems with the Out of Africa theory of how modern humans emerged. A most interesting book which describes all facets of the topic.' Journal of Comparative Human Biology

The First Boat People concerns how people travelled across the world to Australia in the Pleistocene. It traces movement from Africa to Australia, offering a new view of population growth at that time, challenging current ideas, and underscoring problems with the 'Out of Africa' theory of how modern humans emerged. The variety of routes, strategies and opportunities that could have been used by those first migrants is proposed against the very different regional geography that existed at that time. Steve Webb shows the impact of human entry into Australia on the megafauna using fresh evidence from his work in Central Australia, including a description of palaeoenvironmental conditions existing there during the last two glaciations. He argues for an early human arrival and describes in detail the skeletal evidence for the first Australians. This is a stimulating account for students and researchers in biological anthropology, human evolution and archaeology.

Introduction
Prologue
1. Going to Sunda: Lower Pleistocene transcontinental migration
2. Pleistocene population growth
3. From Sunda to Sahul: transequatorial migration in the Upper Pleistocene
4. Upper Pleistocene migration patterns on Sahul
5. Palaeoenvironments, megafauna and the Upper Pleistocene settlement of Central Australia
6. Upper Pleistocene Australians: the Willandran people
7. Origins: a morphological puzzle
8. Migratory time frames and Upper Pleistocene environmental sequences in Australia
9. An incomplete jigsaw puzzle
Appendices
References.

Subject Areas: Human biology [PSX], Physical anthropology [JHMP], Archaeology by period / region [HDD]