pre-modernism

Eric Franz Leher fr102anz at netvigator.com
Sat Jan 26 06:13:33 PST 2002


Thiago Oppermann <topp8564 at mail.usyd.edu.au> wrote:


> On the other hand, the Tasmanians were hunted with dogs and nearly
> wiped out.
>

Speaking of the original Tasmanians, I have a question which you may have some idea about.

It is widely stated that these people had the lowest level of technology

ever observed at first contact with whites. Apparently they were not even capable of making fire independently, ie they had to carry embers with them at all times. Their tools were similarly 'impoverished' (for want of a better term - writing in a hurry). Notable was the complete absence of bone tools (needles, fishooks).

But. Supposedly the fossil record (3000 BCE) shows that these people knew exactly how to fashion such tools, but by 1500 BCE they'd stopped doing it.

So my question is, what is the dominant conjecture on this? Did they (collectively) 'forget' how to do it? Or was it that they just couldn't be stuffed? (to use a nice Australian idiom)

(Yes I realize there is something of a continuum here, ie perhaps they couldn't be bothered and thus lost the knowledge over a number of generations. It's just that I've heard it conjectured that comparatively

isolated populations - in this case five thousand-odd people cut off from everywhere else for ten thousand years - may be subject to a process of failing to maintain and pass on their collective knowledge base).

Incidentally I'm from Tasmania and still find it hard to believe that anyone could have lived there at all with such minimal tech. Perhaps on the comparatively comfortable East Coast - but signs of aboriginal art even crop up on the West Coast, which is much more inhospitable. Bushwalkers that get lost on the West Coast are dead within days.

Thanks.

Eric Leher



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