The Rise of the Sorcerers: Chapter Twelve - THE UNKNOWNS FROM AUSTRALIA
Convicts disembark in mine. A mute land. - The poorest of all primitives. - Three thousand years were attributed to them, and they have more fifteen thousand. - Mulvaney's astonishing discoveries. - And the It's only just begun. - Deportation to a paradise? - Banishment, or reservation. - The end of the Tasmanians. - The exuberance of New York Guinea. - The Great Fair of Prehistory. - The "it doesn't matter" step who." - Some fantasies about the continent of silence.
Separated from Asia before the appearance of Homo sapiens (according to the classical chronology), Australia is an expanse of dry land and almost flat, with an area equal to that of the United States. Mountains and rivers are concentrated in the East; But one can go from the Carpentrias Gulf, to the northeast, to the south coast, never rising more than two hundred meters, and through parched deserts and dusty areas of sparse vegetation.
Separated from Asia before the appearance of Homo sapiens (according to the classical chronology), Australia is an expanse of dry land and almost flat, with an area equal to that of the United States. Mountains and rivers are concentrated in the East; But one can go from the Carpentrias Gulf, to the northeast, to the south coast, never rising more than two hundred meters, and through parched deserts and dusty areas of sparse vegetation.
However, the traces of rivers that have been drained for millennia, and salt deposits, induce to think that, at the end of the Pleistocene or beginning of the post-glacial period, this desolate continent enjoyed a milder climate, and that the vegetation was green in the arid expanses now inhabited termites.
- Are the first inhabitants of these remote times?
- Why and how did immigration come about?
- Was it Australia, traditionally, a place of exile?
- Was a part of the human race to that immense island, without mammals, without beasts of prey, populated only by marsupials, strange herbivores jumpers, as a kind of reserve?
When, in 1788, The whites landed there to throw their convicts into the wild. Those lunar wastelands did not find the slightest vestige of a temple or pyramid, or traces of ancient civilizations; only three hundred thousand wandering aborigines, at the rate of one human being per square mile, in the eastern valleys or on the coast, and one per cent. thirty or forty miles on the rest of the island.
Despite the difference between the humid region and the parched vastness, it is not He perceived no particular adaptation to the environment, no trace of agriculture; only hunting, fishing, gathering wild fruits, nomadism. The mystery of those mute lands gave rise to many Fantasies. Erle Cox imagined a golden sphere, buried in the depths, where slept, from very ancient times, a man and A woman, witnesses of a vanished civilization.
Lovecraft Dreamed in libraries and underground laboratories, abandoned by non-human visitors. From 1929 onwards, a bit of archaeology It replaced poetic interrogation. Perhaps, in the future, a Abundant archaeology will restore its value to this question.
Few villages are poorer than the first inhabitants of Australia. No animals with horns or defenses, which could provide material for the manufacture of weapons. Very little flint and stone Grained. A lot of quartz, and nothing else. No vestige of tombs or of passenger compartments. No ceramics, no metals... or precious stones. No trace of cultivation and no traces of domestic animals, Except for the dog, the dingo. Where did this dog come from? ¿Since When is the Aborigine's companion?
Certain excavations carried out in by D. J. Mulvaney, in the region of Fromm's Landing, place its appearance in the third millennium B.C. And it is the dingo that, together with the hunting man, made disappear numerous species, such as the 'Tasmanian planga' and the 'Tasmanian wolf', Tasmania." For thousands of years, the only changes in the were no doubt produced by the hunger of the dingo and the Hunter Man.
But, until 1960, it was estimated that the first settlers of Australia had quickly preceded the convicts. At most, in three thousand years. Hale and Tindale made, in 1929, the first archaeological discoveries in the Murray River Valley (Adelaide). In a place sheltered by the rocks, they excavated a layer of six-metre-thick layered tanks.
At the most deep, they found stone projectile points; On top, bones of short length, sharp at both ends, and very well they could be hooks; Finally, on the surface, utensils primitive, made of bone or stone, used by the aborigines Local. According to a charcoal sample, the age of the layer It is approximately three thousand years old.
In general, and up to Mulvaney's work, it was accepted, in our last decade, the Tindale and Hale's theory. There had been three "cultures": that of the stone tools, bone tools, and primitive tools which use stone and bone simultaneously. During In those three thousand years, there had been various populations, since There were different "cultures." It was, of course, an assumption that was not a contradicted by no trace of migration to Australia.
Between 1960 and 1964, Mulvaney excavated in a rock shelter in southern Queensland (Ken Niff Cave, in the Mount Moffatt pasture), a cape three and a half meters deep. He unearthed 850 shells or scrapers, mostly quartzite. The Carbon-14 Method It allowed its antiquity to be fixed at sixteen thousand years. New Jobs held in Sydney, Northern Territory, and Victoria, Australia of the South, allowed Mulvaney to formulate a more convincing theory.
Namely, there were no different "cultures" or populations, but one evolution, not determined by the passage from stone to bone, but by the From the utensil without a handle to the utensil with a handle. For eleven thousand For years, the ignored men of Australia were unaware of the use of the mango. In the layers corresponding to about three thousand years ago, handles or handles, fixing resin, traces of ribbons, gut straps or hair straps.
There was, then, a singular stagnation for ten millennia, followed by an abrupt technological progress, which has accelerated in the last millennium, in which We see the appearance of more finely worked stone tools, knives and scissors and gouges, as if he had risen "interdict" and the man would have freed himself from an obligation or of a fatality of permanence.
But what do we know about this man?
There is a significant amount of information, from oral traditions, collected by the former European colonizers. However, the legends, customs, and embryonic technology, viewed more or less seriously, are insufficient as elements of interpretation of the past prehistoric.
On what date can the appearance of the first men in Australia?
Near Melbourne, in the quarries of Keilor sandstone, was A human skull was discovered in 1940. A carbon-14 test, made on a piece of coal found near it, gave a sixteen thousand years old. But it's impossible to know if such a charcoal came from a camp fire or had a natural origin, despite the fact that they were also unearthed in the vicinity stone instruments.
In 1965, a skeleton in a good state of preservation, and an antiquity was obtained identical. The rarity of human fossils is extraordinary, to say the least in the current state of research. One last point It was provided by comparison with skulls found at Wadjak and Saraxvak, on the island of Java, to which a forty thousand years old.
If we think about the extent of the continent and in the tiny number of exhumations carried out since Only a short time ago, we understand Mulvaney's somewhat sad prudence:
"It will take many more excavations to fill gaps in our knowledge and authorise a principle of generalization."
The drawing of a human hand, on the rock that dominates Ken Niff's cave is a recent work of the aborigines. Occupied This cave, where his ancestors took refuge for fifteen years, has been in the same place as a cave. or forty thousand years.
However, in Australia, as elsewhere, research Every year, by several millennia, the modern era pushes back the past human. Today we can think that strangers got there massively when the climate was at its peak, when rivers flowed when the vegetation surrounded the lakes abundant in fish, when the gigantic herbivorous marsupials served as food for the immigrant, in the absence of large animals of prey.
- ¿By What sea route was immigration to?
- And for what reason?
- Was it the banishment from a race?
- Was the establishment of a reservation in a land where there was no danger?
- Was it for fear of some risk? that threatened humanity?
- Was it a kind of Ark of Noah?
- Or an experiment on the part of the Superiors, who perhaps Did they choose this immense desert space as the repository of their knowledge?
- Would they bring large masses of laborers for the work of burial of the former?
We dig in the sands of sleep, in the Kangaroo country...
But if search engines are helped in Australia by the presence of of the descendants, because of their oral conditions and their places of The same cannot be said for the separate island of Tasmania of the mainland through the Bass Strait. The Whites annihilated The Tasmanians. Completely.
By the end of the nineteenth century, there was not even one one. We ourselves shut down all sources of information. Some Excavations have revealed carved quartz projectiles. Not a trace of utensils with handles. How did the Aborigines cross the Bass Strait? Certain studies of the seabed allow It is to be conjectured that, in the Pleistocene, Tasmania was united to the continent. But the map of Australian and Tasmanian prehistory It's still a blank immensity.
Nada puede explicar aún este extraño estancamiento tecnológico y cultural. Nada, en fin, permite imaginar que los primeros australianos vinieron de Nueva Guinea, tan considerable es la diferencia de nivel y de actividad culturales entre ambas poblaciones.
Descubierta hace quinientos años, Nueva Guinea, que cuenta aún con tierras inexploradas, está gobernada en parte por los australianos modernos, que son segregacionistas. El Señor Administrador reina en Port-Moresby, la ciudad de las caletas llenas de guijarros, de botellas vacías y de embarcaciones podridas, donde se albergan los pobres indígenas, aherrojados por los bajos salarios. Los viejos venidos de los bosques y que fueron a parar allí, vagan borrachos por las calles bajas, y unas mujeres embrutecidas, sentadas en el suelo, tratan de vender limones, nueces de betel y collares de conchas.
Descubierta hace quinientos años, Nueva Guinea, que cuenta aún con tierras inexploradas, está gobernada en parte por los australianos modernos, que son segregacionistas. El Señor Administrador reina en Port-Moresby, la ciudad de las caletas llenas de guijarros, de botellas vacías y de embarcaciones podridas, donde se albergan los pobres indígenas, aherrojados por los bajos salarios. Los viejos venidos de los bosques y que fueron a parar allí, vagan borrachos por las calles bajas, y unas mujeres embrutecidas, sentadas en el suelo, tratan de vender limones, nueces de betel y collares de conchas.
The city centre is dominated by a surrounded enclave of barbed wire; Murray's barracks. The Lord Chief of the Administration, which has forgotten nothing about the hard times of the tribal wars and great insecurity, he believes that the country is not prepared for independence and maintains the repressive spirit of the The time of anthropophagy (which has not yet fully passed, we must confess it) and the headhunters.
He is a former breeder of racehorses and farmer from Queensland, ultra-conservative, and who has no particular interest in ethnography. Your helper is a former nurse. The country has changed a bit. They have been pacified tribes and new lands have been opened, which were completely Savages twenty-five years ago. Health services and Missionaries have worked steadfastly. Though with difficulty, it has emerged A small indigenous elite: there are five hundred students in the University. But they are still undesirable.
The spirit of the colonizer has not changed. Its "goodness" rings false. If you He wants to protect a young leader from Gaiga, "so that he can learn our language and transmit to the natives the advantages of civilization," he is asked to write about a civil servant. Contacts with The tribes of the woods have been of little use to the white man, ignorant of language, indifferent to human realities and particular cultural contexts. For administrators, Aboriginal people they are "monkeys of the rocks", or "Oli". This word pidgin means "no matter who."
If independence comes soon, hurried by hatred and misunderstanding, without an intermediate period Enough in a despised village, the forest will close again about its mysteries. The tribes will forget the brief passage of the and return to their eternity, sinking, through the white mist, with its wigs in the shape of a Napoleonic bicorne, tossed by a constant cough, to the clay valleys of the Highlands, to prepare, on stones heated and wrapped in leaves the bodies of the last missionaries, most meritorious, for example. Just as they do with cassowaries.
But young people leaders of the country, although encountering immense difficulties, They will perhaps know how to interpret their brethren better than the Australians, To understand his rejection of our world and reveal his soul to us. TRUE That they will return to their forests and their magic, and that they will return to the hunt of the bird of paradise (which can only be brought down with a spear and arrow, for the rifle is taboo for this beautiful bird); and that they will be the same ones who came (ironically?) to hear the Lord Administrator at the inauguration of the new Koroba airfield, with the body smeared with pig fat or white paint, such as the one who had a pen in his nose, or the one who, naked, he had put a zipper around his forehead, or like that A little boy who wore, for every dress, a pair of painted glasses...
In contrast to the stagnant unity of Aboriginal primitivism Australia, the finesse and cultural multiplicity of New Guinea They're amazing. Because of geography, men from different These tribes communicate little and live in closed valleys. But in each One of these is considerable effervescence.
They talk to each other five hundred different languages, or one-tenth of the number of languages that have been used. all over the world, and some of them are extremely Complicated. The dune language, for example, which classifies the living creatures into categories (those that fly, those that walk, and those that walk). the ones that crawl: the pigs and the women), A vast vocabulary whose variations are in tone, as in Chinese.
The diversity of clothing, decoration, customs and traditions culminate in this people, who ignore the concept of unity and that it is, without a doubt, the most egalitarian and the most independent of the world. planet. Without sovereigns, without hereditary leaders, it elects only one in case of conflict, to lead them in combat.
It seems that the men of New Guinea are boasting of the of their customs, and, far from wishing to imitate the They assert their uniqueness in front of them with passion and with a kind of mocking satisfaction. Leo Hannet, the most of young Guinean leaders, who was trained in a Later, at the University, he admired Camus, Luther King, Kennedy and Senghor.
If one day he must wield the reins of power in his country, he will oppose the uprooting of his brethren, to emigration to cold and artificial cities, and It will see to it that civilization and tradition are brought together in the in the real world, in the small villages, in the clearings of the forest, where Sweet potatoes are grown. A solid earth, a nature and a Men drunk with colors and freedom. In the cool forest, the Trees ooze continuously. At dawn, the valleys of the The Highlands are like rivers of milky mist, in which the Porters.
In the heights, when the sun appears, the ground covered with yellow and black butterflies, which spread their wings to Dry. What dialogue could be established between the white, greedy and abstract, with their concrete and their graphics, and those men immersed in Dalinian landscapes, which draw flowers on their legs and touch each other with parrot and bird of paradise feathers? One month Ten years ago, the Whites organized, at Mount Hagen, an exhibition of barnyard animals and agricultural machinery.
Herself I had a plan to hold this fair every two years. The The Indians heard about it and went to see what was happening. The Tribes came out of the forests, in their festive costumes. When the were so numerous that they took the lead over the Australian and Dutch farmers, organising the only and formidable "Biennial of Prehistory" of the world. After that, there was no no choice but to let them do it.
And every year, in August, they come to to show white people, and themselves, what they are. Tribes that Before, they didn't treat each other, they get together, dance, sing and shout brandishing spears, bows and arrows. There are twenty thousand in the arena; The earth trembles, and the tourist photographers are exposed to being Trampled. The Asarus, the Kandeps, the Chimbusn, the Hewas and the They have walked whole days and nights, crossing valleys and valleys. forests, in which the traveller usually finds no more than a hundred men in several weeks, to commemorate, in front of the whites, the ancient world.
There are the porpaigas, with their wigs adorned with buttons of gold, and their necklaces of dog's teeth, and their loincloths of Shells. There are the dunes, which live in huts, separated from the men of women, with whom they are only found in the bushes, and paint their faces red and yellow for the initiation, and pierce the nasal septum with a blue feather so long that its ends brush against their shoulders.
And there are the little men of the river Asaro, who are the strangest and most repellent, entirely smeared with ochre and grey mud, with crude masks made from the same clay; characters from the origins, clumsy, terrifying, painful... But you have to sell the tractors and show cows.
In the afternoon, the organisers of the white fair gather these thousands of witnesses by force of magical eternity, so that the minister may pronounce his speech, and the army paraded, and the polo match was held. Afterwards, the curious start the return to Port-Moresby, dominated by the for his imprisonment. And the tribes are leaving too, to be diluted in the distant lands populated by butterflies...
Why this exuberance in New Guinea, and this stagnation in New Guinea? Australia? There do not appear to have been any contacts. The myths of Eastern Australia reports that the Earth progressively emerged from An original sea, but they don't talk about visits, or trips.
Why this exuberance in New Guinea, and this stagnation in New Guinea? Australia? There do not appear to have been any contacts. The myths of Eastern Australia reports that the Earth progressively emerged from An original sea, but they don't talk about visits, or trips.
All they are related to the "times of the Dream," eternally Present and Source of All Life, Kingdom of Celestial Heroes creators, fathers of shamanism, who dwelt in Heaven, in a a place where fresh water and quartz crystals abounded. These are the Gods who govern procreation and death, things that govern supernatural both. Another hero, who now seems wise, now foolish, he was the mediator between the Gods and men, to whom he contributed rudiments of knowledge, technique and magical medicine.
In All these myths, vaguely gleaned from oral tradition, seem to a taboo against change and evasion, as if this An isolated immensity was destined for confinement.
In 1963, a singular piece of information came to us, totally disconcerting. On an Australian terrain sheltered by rocks, He had discovered a cache of Egyptian coins, the hiding of which It dated back approximately four thousand years. Readers who They told us this information they referred to certain magazines obscure, while no archaeological publication I had mentioned this discovery.
However, the magazine Teknika Molodeji, which dedicates a Regular section to unexplained facts, commented by people echoed this news and published photographs of the pieces unearthed. If this finding were to be confirmed, that, Naturally, it must be considered with the utmost caution by the archaeologist, huge questions would be raised.
It would be difficult imagine an Egyptian expedition to Australia, given that we know their means of navigation. What traveler, explorers of the world does four mi) years, they would have gone to deposit that flow in the ground Australian? Which brings us back to our hypothesis: Was it Traditionally, this continent is a place of deposit, an immense A hiding place, used by visitors from outside or by a breed who also organized a deportation of men kept in ignorance?
Obviously, this is just one Romantic interrogation, added to the mystery of the population Australia, which we thought was recent, but the few Excavations carried out over the last ten years have traced back to the paleolithic. Hopefully, a more systematic investigation will reveal the secrets of this land "forgotten by time", as Borroughs said.