Tasmanian Aborigines and the origins of language

6 Tasmanian Aborigines and the origins of language Iain Davidson he nature of Tasmanian isolation First contacts between Indigenous people and explorers or colonisers from lands across the sea were always extraordinary events.1 At Recherche Bay in 1793, there was considerable questioning of the nature of the people the French were encountering. By the French account, the Tasmanians, too, seemed curious about the nature of the visitors from the sea—which is hardly surprising if we consider the quite extraordinary nature of contact for the Tasmanians. he very irst humans who lived in Australia had to cross the sea to get there, just as the European invaders did.2 But about 10,000 years ago there was already substantial variation in body and behaviour on the one land mass, from the Melanesian agriculturalists of highland New Guinea,3 on one hand, to the Australian ishers, gatherers and hunters,4 on the other (Figure 6.1). hese disparate peoples were destined to be isolated from each other a couple of thousand years later by the looding of the Arafura Sea and Torres Strait by the rising sea level of the last great global warming.5 he isolation of Greater Australia from the islands of south-east Asia was great,6 but not complete: for we know that the dingo was introduced to Australia perhaps 4,000 years ago,7 and we also know that several Indonesian islands have Australian animals as part of their fauna which must have been introduced by people travelling back to the west.8 In Timor, cuscus bones have been found that may be as old as 9,000 years.9 But Tasmania was even more extreme. he Tasmanians had never seen a European before 1642, and no inhabitant of Tasmania had seen anyone from outside the island since it had been cut of by rising seas 14,000 years before—at the end of the last Ice Age.10 Indeed, we can go further and state that, unless knowledge was retained in the oral tradition over those 14,000 years, no Tasmanian could have known that land other than Tasmania, and people other than Tasmanians even existed. We can be reasonably sure, then, as we cannot for Australian or New Guinea irst contacts that, apart from a brief encounter with Cook In Mulvaney, J and Tyndale-Biscoe, H (eds) (2007) Rediscovering Recherche Bay. Canberra: Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, pp 69-85. 12ka Preminghana Figure 6.1. Digital elevation model of Australia with details of regions now known as Bass Strait sea-level at 14 ka69 and Torres Strait at 12 ka.70 Rocky Cape West Point 14ka Figure 6.2. Cook’s 1777 meeting with Aborigines on Bruny Island, Tasmania. (National Library of Australia. nla.map-nk10592a-9-v) 70 Rediscovering Recherche Bay in 1777 (Figure 6.2), the people described with such vividness by Labillardière had had no contact at all with people from any other society near or far. For the Australian mainland, and for New Guinea, even when their people made irst contact with Europeans, there was some possibility, however remote, that aspects of their behaviour as observed and described in the 18th and early-19th century had been inluenced by earlier contact with people from Indonesia or elsewhere to the north—such as the Macassan traders who visited the Kimberley and Arnhem Land.11 Not so Tasmania, where the irst contact between Tasmanians and Europeans, most fully documented at Recherche Bay, was contact between people whose traditions were separated absolutely by the isolation of Tasmania 14,000 years before. For the Tasmanians, their technology, their social and economic conditions, their biology and behaviour, as irst described by the d’Entrecasteaux expedition, were uniquely the product of their circumstances when they left behind their relatives on the mainland, and the ways they found to survive and adjust to the various changes over the ensuing fourteen millennia. his isolation had been a matter of curiosity to Europeans in the 19th century: he natives of the East Coast have a tradition that this Island was settled by emigrants from a far country, that they came here on land, that the sea was subsequently formed. … for aught we know V.D.L. [Van Diemen’s Land] might at an early period have been joined to N.H. [New Holland] in which case the tradition would be true. 12 Figure 6.3. Watercraft from Eastern Tasmania.71 (National Library of Australia nla.pic-an7573651-v) Tasmanian Aborigines and the origins of language 71 his report seems to suggest a tradition of dry land crossing, long before any evidence was available to Tasmanians or Europeans that Bass Strait had ever been dry. Tasmania is not the place to be sceptical of oral traditions, but if we are to believe that the tradition was indeed ‘true’, as Robinson described it, then it was astonishing. Just how astonishing can be seen from Wiessner’s work among the Enga of New Guinea.13 By analysing and cross-checking an enormous range of evidence—186 genealogies from eighty-six tribes—in Highland New Guinea, Wiessner has been able to show that oral traditions preserve corroboratable information back seven to eight generations; historical traditions retain good information for the last ive generations; and genealogies may go back ten generations. In the best of cases, the histories constructed could be tied to the known dates for the introduction of the sweet potato. By comparison, the Tasmanians were isolated for more than 500 generations, or ifty times as long. As Rhys Jones and Jim Allen so graphically demonstrated in the Tom Hayden ilm he Last Tasmanian?, the watercraft depicted in an early-19th century picture from the Baudin expedition (Figure 6.3), were not suitable for travel on the open sea. So Rhys Jones in 1968 argued that the earliest evidence he found in his excavations at Rocky Cape, while not demonstrating human occupation back to the Pleistocene, at more than 8,000 years was suiciently close to the date of the isolation of Tasmania to make it probable that it was colonised on foot.14 Getting to know the Tasmanians Nearly one hundred years after the encounters at Recherche Bay, Henry Roth, while sitting in his armchair at the Bankield Museum, Halifax, compiled the known accounts of Tasmanian Aborigines into a single volume.15 Henry had been to Australia to work in Mackay, but he never went to Tasmania.16 Henry’s work was one of the great classics of armchair anthropology, reprinted nine years later17 at the dawning of 19th century ieldwork-based anthropology18—we can hardly call it a new development in light of the French research at Recherche Bay. In the luxury of Bankield House, originally built by Edward Akroyd in a park from which he could survey the mill he owned and the terrace houses of his workers—workers who doubtless processed Australian wool there—Henry wrote about the conditions of people half a world away. From this privileged context, he reproduced Labillardière’s account of the exchanges at Recherche Bay in a section called ‘Psychology’, which was much exercised with diferences of dress and comportment between the clothed Frenchmen and the unclothed Tasmanians. he diferences in clothing were as strange to the Frenchmen as burqas are to the youth of Cronulla, or indeed to modern French educationists—with the tables strangely turned: the people with power (the French) were dramatically over-dressed compared with the Tasmanians’ nakedness. We do not know whether the Tasmanians thought the Frenchmen’s clothing ofensive though they did explore beneath it to see that the French were men; one was not.19 We also know that they did not adopt the clothing they were given, showing interest in the buttons, but not the garments. here is a very revealing passage: I wished to get a kangaroo skin; among the savages about us there happened to be only a young girl who had one. When I proposed to her, to give it me in 72 Rediscovering Recherche Bay exchange for a pair of pantaloons, she ran away to hide herself in the woods. he other natives appeared truly hurt at her refusal, and called to her several times. At length she yielded to their entreaties, and came to bring me the skin … She received a pair of pantaloons …20 (And we probably can say that we have some idea of what those pantaloons looked like from the drawing shown in Figure 5.1) We showed her the manner of wearing them; but notwithstanding, it was necessary for us to put them on for her ourselves. To this she yielded with the best grace in the world, resting both her hands on our shoulders, to support herself, while she lifted up irst one leg, then the other, to put them into this new garment. he concept of nakedness is, of course, laden with cultural values.21 We may ask whether the Tasmanians had any such preconceptions about nakedness. Clothing is not just about protection from the elements, though in climates only a little more extreme than Recherche Bay it must have been necessary for that purpose—the scarcity of kangaroo skins suggests that they were not needed at the end of February in 1793, despite the fact that the temperature fell to 6°C on the night before the irst encounter between the French and the Tasmanians.22 Clothing is also regularly used to indicate status and personal relations23—just look at the hats of the Frenchmen, and the handkerchief. And the Tasmanians were no exception. We know from the early drawings that Tasmanians, as with other Australians, wore body scars. Some of these were similar between individuals, others were diferent. Were these markers of status, or group identity, as well as of individual diference? Cook had commented on the scariication of the people he saw in January 1777 at Adventure Bay on the east side of Bruny Island.24 He also noted that none of the people wore ornaments, and indeed rejected his gift of beads. Like the igure in the later portrait from the Baudin expedition (Figure 6.4), the Recherche Bay people used beads. Labillardière describes how one of the young people: Figure 6.4. Homme du Cap de Diemen by Jacques Louis Copia.72 (National Library of Australia nla.pic-an7573651-v) had the generosity to give me a few shells of the whelk kind, pierced near the middle and strung like a necklace … A handkerchief supplied the place of this present, [was it the handkerchief in the Piron drawing?] gratifying the utmost wishes of my savage, who advanced towards me, that I might tie it round his head for him, and who expressed the greatest joy, as he lifted his hand up to feel it again and again. 25 Tasmanian Aborigines and the origins of language 73 he marks of language use and modern human behaviour Beads have recently become a matter of discussion in the archaeological literature for their signiicance in the emergence of modern human behaviour26—including the fact of their occurrence in Australia quite soon after irst colonisation.27 Noble and I argued that such personal markers of identiication would have been particularly important in the environment of early language use.28 he reason for this, we suggested, is that the adoption of a means of communication based on the use of symbols that are both arbitrary and conventional, places a high premium on the ability to identify individuals who share the same conventions. he irst colonisation, itself, we argued,represents one of the ixed points in understanding the emergence of that modern human behaviour which lowed from the origin, among humans alone, of language based on communication using symbols.29 he construction of a watercraft to make the necessary crossings required planning abilities that follow from a cognitive ability unknown among other animals, and rarely represented in the archaeological record of earlier hominins. he presence of distinctive artefacts, such as the beads, further implied the presence of communication based on conventional symbols. he archaeological evidence of the irst colonists of Australia indicates that the watercraft and the beads were not the only indicators of modern human behaviour (Figure 6.5). he Figure 6.5 Distribution of some of the symbolic evidence from early in the archaeological record of Australia.73 74 Rediscovering Recherche Bay ground ochre from the lowest layers at Malakunanja and Nauwalabila in Arnhem Land makes it highly likely that the irst Australians were using ochre to make pigment to apply to themselves or other objects.30 O’Connor has excavated painted rock at Carpenter’s Gap in the Kimberley that dates to about 40,000 years ago.31 he burials at Lake Mungo in western New South Wales are possibly the oldest burials in the world at 43,000 years32 and at least two of them involved diferent but elaborate behaviour we should probably call ritual.33 Ground bone points, as found dating to about 20,000 years ago at Wareen Cave in Tasmania,34 indicate the performance of the capacity to construct artefacts to a preconceived shape. Ground stone axes also reveal this capacity, at 23,000 years, possibly 10,000 years earlier in Arnhem Land than anywhere else in the world.35 Archaeological evidence of this type is often featured in ‘trait lists’, such as Noble and I produced in 1991 to show by examples what we meant by the phrase ‘modern human behaviour’.36 Most importantly, we justiied the deinition of these traits theoretically by showing how they are the products of three characteristic outcomes of language use: information low; planning depth; and conceptualisation. All of these, we argued, are features that follow from the emergence of language, and, as revealed in a recent paper, we can now it such abilities into a more comprehensive model of the evolution of hominin and human cognition.37 Information low might be exempliied by the Tasmanian tradition of dry land colonisation that Robinson recorded, whatever its veracity; planning depth by the ability evident in the achievement of the irst colonisation of Australia across open water; and conceptualisation would apply to the beads and personal decorations recorded among the Tasmanians. McBrearty and Brooks38 more recently produced a longer trait list (but without the theoretical argument). Many of their traits, but not all, have an explanation in the theoretical principles we outlined—information low, planning depth and conceptualisation. Noble and I had not included in our earlier discussions two traits of the technology suggested by McBrearty and Brooks. hese were blades, microblades and backing—which need further argument about their conventional nature to meet our criteria—and the proliferation of tool categories—for which I see no simple justiication within our theoretical model. As it happens these traits are not features of Tasmanian material culture either in the ethnographic or the archaeological records. Similarly, of those aspects of economy and society discussed by McBrearty and Brooks, Noble and I39 did not discuss curation of exotic materials because their mere presence may be due to a variety of diferent circumstances. And we did not discuss scheduling of activities, site re-occupation and the structured use of space because these too have ambiguous characteristics in the archaeological record, while being obvious enough in the ethnographic record. We now know that the two less important traits of the material technology are not represented in the Tasmanian record—blades and proliferation of tool categories.40 But the four unimportant aspects of economy and society are represented in Tasmania—curation of raw materials, scheduling of activities, site reoccupation, and the use of structured space.41 here is a further absence of four, and probably ive, other traits, which, when present, are said to be indicators of modern human behaviour. he four traits certainly absent are the standardisation of tool form, and regional variation of technology, intensiication of economic activities, and the presence of distinctive artefact styles in diferent regions. Tasmanian Aborigines and the origins of language 75 he ifth trait is the presence of long distance exchange, a feature that is always diicult to identify and distinguish from the long distance procurement of raw materials.42 So about a quarter of the traits on the McBrearty and Brooks list are not present in Tasmania. What are we to make of this? his analysis raises questions about appropriate methods of interpreting the archaeological record. No one doubts that all people who have ever lived in Australia have been fully modern people. Yet the Tasmanian archaeological record appears to lack some of the archaeological indicators of modern human behaviour. here is little to be gained by enumerating traits or numbers of items of technology, for the point about humanity is that we are able to adjust to the conditions for survival through the technology of the mind as well as material technology. But those traits that were present undoubtedly required the information low, planning depth and conceptualisation that are the real markers of modern human behaviour. Most importantly these were the cultural characteristics that were so well explored by the d’Entrecasteaux expedition. he interactions described by Labillardière are full of descriptions of established behaviours, of emotional reactions which imply more than instinctive fears, of attempts to communicate by improvised gestures as well as words, and of curiosity about the new environment that was being brought to them. hese are the normal cultural reactions whenever there has been irst contact, whatever rationalisations the Frenchmen may have had for their exhaustive descriptions. hese interactions show beyond any doubt that the Tasmanians, despite 14,000 years of isolation from the rest of humanity, were cognitively little diferent from any other humans. hey lacked writing and printing, which, it has been argued, make cognitive diferences in history, but they did not lack the ability to acquire these behaviours. Representing Tasmanians In one of his most notorious papers, Rhys Jones43 relected on the simple toolkit of the 19th century Tasmanians and on his discovery that the Tasmanians had once caught ish but by the 18th century had taboos against it.44 he early recorders of Aboriginal life on the mainland were all impressed by the complex ceremonies of the Australian Aborigines, but the Tasmanians appeared to lack these. Jones concluded his relections with a speculation that the long isolation of the Tasmanians had ‘squeezed their intellectuality’, asking the question ‘were they in fact doomed—doomed to a slow strangulation of the mind?’ Particularly through the archaeology of the Tasmanian South-west Forests,45 we now know much more about the archaeology of the Tasmanians, how they coped with the vicissitudes of the climatic and environmental luctuations of the Pleistocene,46 how they survived the expansion of the rainforests and the isolation of the island from the rest of Australia, and how they changed their economic dependence on the sea to increase their focus on seals and abalone.47 And amidst all this, they also maintained what we can see as a rich symbolic life—evident in their continued use of body markings, but manifest in other ways too. In addition, since Rhys Jones’s paper, we know more about the history of isolated human populations. Mike Morwood’s work over the last ten years on the island of Flores would seem to suggest that there was a population of human ancestors who were isolated on that 76 Rediscovering Recherche Bay much smaller island for more like 800,000 years and yet survived until after the date when Tasmania was cut of from the rest of Australia.48 But I think there is another point about Jones’s judgement and the historical context of our knowledge about the processes of human adaptation. Humans who speak languages use symbols in other ways too. We need to consider a much broader question of the ways in which we structure our whole lives symbolically, not least, of course through claims for the possession of land. In our own lives, we do this at an individual level by markers of identity in the way we dress—the use of neckties, surely the quintessential symbolic marker of the 20th century, and the wearing of special clothing to denote membership of particular groups—often involving religious reasons for covering up women with habits, burqas, or just with hats or handkerchiefs. We do it at a societal level in the ways in which we demarcate the special status of buildings—from the grand precincts of religious buildings to the picket fences of suburbia—or in eating habits such as the avoidance of certain animals as foods in one society which might be common in others—horses and dogs are avoided in Australia, but we do eat pigs and cows. And we also have cultural conventions about representations— some societies do and others do not depict humans. All of these choices are both arbitrary and conventional and thus part of the structuring of our lives symbolically. How we do this depends on choices made at levels we often do not understand but, once established, they can be defended irrationally and often to our detriment. Such choices are the stuf and substance of our cultures and they provide a measure of coherence within the groups whose customs they are. But they also mark diferences between cultures and when we do not understand cultural diference, we often retreat into an irrational defence of our cultural norms as natural and ‘theirs’ as strange, alien or threatening, forgetting that our norms are just as strange, alien and threatening to people from other cultures. On the west coast of Tasmania (for site locations see Figure 6.1) are vast shell middens like that at West Point—a prime site that illustrates that, although they obtained huge amounts of food from the sea, for the last 3,500 years or so Tasmanians did not eat ish.49 Yet at Rocky Cape, 75 km away, before this avoidance, ish seem to have been caught using baited box traps and possibly nets.50 Both items of technology imply a conceptualisation of tool-making that probably exceeded the technology described in the 19th century. About 12 km to the north of West Point are the engravings at Mt Cameron West (Preminghana)51—another site where ish remains were not found. hese engravings date from the last couple of thousand years, long after the isolation of Tasmania. here are two possibilities, both remarkable. First, they might be the result of a long continued tradition of engraving that was continuous from before the isolation. Or they might have been a separately invented tradition, and some might say the convergence on the use of circles and other simple images would represent a remarkable coincidence. Either way we know that the people who lived by getting food from the sea but not catching ish nevertheless structured their lives symbolically through markings of their environments such as rock art,52 or more ephemeral tombs such as those described by the Baudin expedition in 1801 (Figure 6.6), and the marked wood found near them.53 It seems likely that, even by the time Robinson toured the island in the 1830s, many such markings would have been rotted or decayed. Tasmanian Aborigines and the origins of language 77 At this stage we need to consider the whole record of symbol use in Australia. It is generally accepted that the watercraft that brought people to Australia is part of a suite of evidence for early use of symbols found across Australia.54 Such evidence is widely spread across the continent from north to south, east to west and into the centre (Figure 6.5). he artefacts of irst colonisation are material manifestations in the archaeological record of Figure 6.6 Tasmanian tombs discovered by Peron and marked pieces of Australia that make it certain bark found near the tombs drawn by Petit.74 that the irst colonists came fully equipped with symbolic communication and symbolic construction of their worlds. hey were fully modern people in their anatomy and in their behaviour. But Brumm and Moore55 have pointed out that the evidence is not uniformly of the presence of symbolic artefacts throughout the occupation of Australia. We might represent this schematically in Table 6.1. How do we account for this pattern? Table 6.1. Chronological distribution of evidence of symbol use in Australia.75 (See Figure 6.5) Australia 75 ka–65 ka 65 ka–55 ka 55 ka–45 ka 25 ka–15 ka Earliest possible date More likely colonisation date Beads at Riwi, burials at Mungo Beads at Mandu Mandu, axes in NT Symbolic stuf decreasing 15 ka–5 ka 5 ka–present Art increasing Lots of stuf 45 ka–35 ka 35 ka–25 ka America First colonisation, big game hunting ‘eked out a mere existence’ ‘Seeds of societal inequality and hierarchy’ In Australia, at least, there may be a sampling issue. Brumm and Moore show that the number of sites with symbolic evidence increases through time, but so too does the number of sites known for each period (Table 6.2). In fact, the number of sites with symbolic evidence generally decrease as a proportion of the number of sites known. his suggests that not all 78 Rediscovering Recherche Bay sites will necessarily have evidence of symbol use, but, as you increase the number of sites sampled, the probability of inding such evidence will increase. hat is one factor. John Speth56 has produced a similar argument about North America—suggesting that there is an absence of markers of modernity after the early Palaeoindian stage with its big game hunters using elaborately styled projectile points (Table 6.1). For 5,000 years or so afterwards, Archaic foragers ‘eked out a meagre existence harvesting seeds, nuts and smaller animals…’57 Speth suggested that this means it is inappropriate to use absence of evidence in any argument about the behaviour of earlier hominins such as Neandertals. Table 6.2. Number of sites with symbolic evidence by period.76 Percentages calculated for this paper. AUSTRALIA N sites >40 ka 40 ka–31 ka 30 ka–21 ka 20 ka–10 ka 4 18 31 96 N sites with symbols ?1 3 4 8 Percent with symbols 25 16.7 12.9 8.3 I, too, like to make a comparison between Australia and North America—with reference to environmental conditions. he temperature curve from the Vostok ice-core in the Antarctic shows the pattern of climate change over the last 160,000 years58 (Figure 6.7). Australia was colonised at 50,000 (or so) years ago, but sea levels were never low enough for people to walk here. he Americas were colonised about 15,000 years ago as the extreme cold of the Arctic was ameliorating. he previous time such environmental conditions had prevailed was 80,000 years ago, and no one is suggesting that the Americas were colonised then.59 Calculated temperature, degrees Celsius diference from present Vostok data, Antarctica Age, years before present Figure 6.7. Pattern of climate change in Antarctica from Vostok ice core.77 Tasmanian Aborigines and the origins of language 79 Between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago something changed. I suggest it was the emergence of anticipatory planning—the propositional system implied by modern human cognition and characterised here as the emergence of language. he colonisation of the north that was necessary for people to get into the Americas across a Bering Strait made dry by the Ice Age lowering of sea level required the sort of planning that comes from propositional thought, symbol use, language use, etc. he similarity with the cognitive requirements for colonisation of Australia is only made stronger if the initial colonisation of the Americas involved the use of boats moving between coastal refuges.60 Bill McGrew once attempted to compare the technology of chimpanzees with the supposedly simplest human technology—that from Tasmanian Aborigines.61 To do this he used a methodology devised by Oswalt62 which identiied the number of elements in a technology. Using this methodology, McGrew argued that the chimpanzee’s termite wand and the Tasmanian digging stick were at a similar level of technology. Alas, although the intent is ine (though some found it ofensive even to make a scientiic comparison between humans with present-day descendants and non-human animals), but the methodology is lawed. McGrew himself acknowledged the simplicity of the termiting wand. he digging stick, on the other hand, is not just a piece of wood snatched from the nearest tree to poke into a nearby mound that is a product of the activities of prey animals, it has been made with stone scrapers, and is part of a tool kit which includes baskets for carrying the dug up tubers —themselves not always as easy to ind as a termite mound. We know that elsewhere in Australia digging sticks are also the subject of a knowable ritual and artistic life of which no trace need survive in the archaeological record. Some have suggested (generally in conversation and not in print) that the argument is diicult because all archaeologists have left are stone tools that may reveal evidence of having worked wood. Generally such people do not argue that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but rather that absence of evidence could be a justiication for a belief in the presence of such symbolical complexity. his is why the evidence for the watercraft is such an important part of the argument. Once the evidence suggests that humans have reached modern human cognition, then we might suggest that the evidence of symbolic complexity has been lost by taphonomic processes. Before that we have no reason to believe it. Without these signal moments it would be easy to suggest that later absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but coming after the signal moments, a taphonomic argument is appropriate. So, going back to Jones’s approach to the Tasmanians and their cultural practice of not eating ish, what can we say thirty years later? What seems to me to have been missing from Jones’s account was a sense of the variation among isher-gatherer-hunting people. He was not alone in this. For too long, textbooks emphasised that there was a time before agriculture when all people lived by ishing, gathering and hunting, without paying enough attention to the variations among modern people who live that way, and less to the variations that existed in the past. My own work in Spain has emphasised that the variations between east and west Mediterranean peoples led one lot to agriculture, the other not.63 he contrast is exempliied by the encounter at Recherche Bay where the French planted gardens, which, it must be said, did not prosper during their absence. However, in 1793, Labillardière hoped the Tasmanians would soon take up agriculture, if only to free the women from the exertions of diving for abalone and crayish. 80 Rediscovering Recherche Bay Views that encapsulate a preconception of the advantages of agriculture over all forms of isher-gatherer-hunter life have been widespread historically and are (almost) enshrined in the Middle Eastern myth of Jacob and Esau. Early accounts of irst contact in the Americas seem even further from reality than those biblical myths,64 emphasising yet again the truly extraordinary quality of the descriptions made at Recherche Bay. Labillardière made comparisons between the Tasmanians and agriculturalists and speculated about the likely outcomes of contact with colonists,65 but in his writings there are not the obvious distortions of the North American accounts. In both cases—the bible and contact with North American Indians—what was being established was a myth of justiication for depriving the Indigenous inhabitants of land. Cook’s account was not free of this—stressing as it did the lack of agriculture—but Labillardière seems to have been concerned with assessing the evidence before passing judgement or making political claims. Now we are in a better position to understand that isher-gatherer-hunter societies were diverse particularly through the ways they related to each other and their environments symbolically. We see this in the archaeological record of the diversity of rock art across the country—including Tasmania. But we see it too in the fact that, despite a presumptively small initial colonising group who presumably spoke a small number of languages, at contact greater Australia (including New Guinea) had more than a thousand languages.66 Such diversity is the result of a 50,000-year history of diversiication and, I would argue, the generation of change and diference through the use of symbols. Seen in this way, the apparent impoverishment of Tasmanian culture, which Jones pointed to as a paradox, is only paradoxical in the context of Jones’s preconceptions about the directedness of cultural change. Provided we hang on to the language–using, cognitively modern nature of the behaviour of Tasmanians, the appearance of Tasmanian culture, described with such acuity by the French at Recherche Bay, is simply a manifestation of variation in behaviour among isher-gatherer-hunters.67 Understanding how and why some groups of isher-gatherer-hunters, but not others, discovered a way of life we came to call agriculture and pastoralism68 must be seen against this sort of understanding of the factors that generated diversity between diferent peoples in Australia—but that is another story. Tasmanian Aborigines and the origins of language 81 References 1. Porter, HC (1979) he inconstant savage. England and the North American Indian. London: Duckworth. 2. Davidson, I (2001) ‘he requirements for human colonisation of Australia’, in Faunal and loral migration and evolution in SE Asia-Australia. 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