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PALAEOANTHROPOLOGY

The first hominin fleet

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 3, pages 999–1000 (2019)Cite this article

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New research suggests that groups of ~130 modern humans at minimum undertook planned expeditions to colonise Sahul via a northern route. However, the necessity of more evidence to test this model reflects a need for change in the way we investigate the population history of this region.

Neither paper uses new archaeological, palaeoenvironmental or genomic data to bring insight into the topic of the earliest Australo-Papuans, but rather they use modelling and, in the case of Bradshaw et al., big data syntheses to reconstruct environmental parameters to help understand the carrying capacity for populations in Sahul. This innovative approach is to be praised, but models are only as good as the data they use. While the earth system model LOVECLIM (loch–vecode-ecbilt-clio-agism; a model that brings together five different environmental models for reconstructing past climatic change) is cleverly employed as a proxy in the absence of reliable palaeo-records, there are issues with using the archaeological radiocarbon dataset as a demographic proxy to understand population changes, and with the metadata analyses of megafaunal occurrence that are invoked to suggest that higher prey availability was one of the environmental parameters during the initial colonisation. It has been convincingly argued that reconstructing past demography through summing radiocarbon dates from archaeological site radiometric dates does not have much to do with demographic change4, and metadata analyses of megafauna are identified as unreliable in Sahul due to poor chronological control over the vast majority of sites5. When multiple different datasets are combined, and when these datasets have multiple flaws, it may cause problems for modelling, no matter how sophisticated it is.

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Fig. 1: The emergent picture of regional Pleistocene complexity from genomes, fossils and material culture.

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  1. School of Social Science, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Michael C. Westaway

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Correspondence to Michael C. Westaway.

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Westaway, M.C. The first hominin fleet. Nat Ecol Evol 3, 999–1000 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0928-9

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