Early human migration to Australia, perhaps 60,000 years ago, came from Indonesia and involved another first in human affairs — the use of boats. Over time, people settled in most regions of this huge continent, though quite sparsely. Scholars estimate the population of Australia at about 300,000 in 1788, when the first Europeans arrived. Over tens of thousands of years, the peoples of Australia developed perhaps 250 languages; learned to collect a wide variety of bulbs, tubers, roots, seeds, and cereal grasses; and became proficient hunters of large and small animals, as well as birds, fish, and other marine life. A relatively simple technology, appropriate to a gathering and hunting economy, sustained Australia’s Aboriginal people into modern times. When outsiders arrived in the late eighteenth century, Aboriginals still practiced that ancient way of life, despite the presence of agriculture in nearby New Guinea.

Accompanying Aboriginals’ technological simplicity and traditionalism was the development of an elaborate and complex outlook on the world, known as the Dreamtime. (See Working with Evidence: Stories of the Australian Dreamtime.) Expressed in endless stories, in extended ceremonies, and in the evocative rock art of the continent’s peoples, the Dreamtime recounted the beginning of things: how ancestral beings crisscrossed the land, creating its rivers, hills, rocks, and waterholes; how various peoples came to inhabit the land; and how they related to animals and to one another. In this view of the world, everything in the natural order was a vibration, an echo, a footprint of these ancient happenings, which linked the current inhabitants intimately to particular places and to timeless events in the past.

The journeys of the Dreamtime’s ancestral beings reflect the networks of migration, communication, and exchange that linked the continent’s many Paleolithic peoples. Far from living as isolated groups, they had long exchanged particular stones, pigments, materials for ropes and baskets, wood for spears, feathers and shells for ornaments, and an addictive psychoactive drug known as pituri over distances of hundreds of miles. Songs, dances, stories, and rituals likewise circulated. Precisely how far back in time these networks extend is difficult to pinpoint, but it seems clear that Paleolithic Australia, like ancient Europe, was both many separate worlds and, at the same time, one loosely connected world.