rationalskepticism.org

KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE AND TIM GILLIN

The extinction of the Australian pygmies

From the 1940s until the 1960s, it was fairly widely known there were pygmies in Australia. They lived in North Queensland and had come in from the wild of the tropical rainforests to live on missions in the region.

looks like homogenous is losing ground One of the major mtDNA studies was done in 1989 on the populations of the Pacific region. It was made by two of the leading pioneers of DNA research, Mark Stoneking and Allan Wilson, then of the University of California, Berkeley, who were the authors of the now famous study that found our oldest modern human ancestor, the 200,000 year-old African woman, “Mitochondrial Eve”. Their Pacific study included data from 21 Aboriginal Australians from four regions: Alice Springs, Darwin, Perth and the Broome-Derby area. It found that mtDNA types were not shared between different regions of Australia and that the distribution of mtDNA types in Australia was diverse, just like on other continents. The most likely explanation, Stoneking and Wilson argued, was that “the populations that colonized each continent (including Australia) consisted of more than one mtDNA type.” In other words, the Aboriginal population was not homogenous.

In fact, Stoneking and Wilson said their work showed that at least 15 different mtDNA lineages colonized Australia. They said this confirmed an earlier study of Aboriginal Australians done in 1987 with a smaller sample, which found seven different mtDNA lineages. The authors acknowledged the smallness of their sample but argued that a bigger size would only increase the number of different lineages to be found. “Probably the most important insight to date,” they summarized, “is that relatively many females were involved in the colonization of Australia and Papua New Guinea.” Stoneking and Wilson were heavily sarcastic about the “one people” thesis:

They were 1 metre to 1.3 metres tall, black, crinkly-haired naked males, and carried spears".

That was how one startled farmer described three small natives that he saw moving through a mountainside rainforest near his Tully, north Queensland farm in January 1982. Local residents are convinced that the farmer had seen members of a "lost pygmy tribe", long reputed to inhabit the rugged mountain country behind the town.

Further South, in the mountains behind Townsville, in 1981 two bushwalkers claimed they sighted a small group of pygmy-sized, animal skin clothed natives, scavenging rainforest soil for food. Having seen the vast, taipan-infested jungles of northern Queensland-through the Atherton Tableland to Cape York during my many wanderings as a naturalist-I can easily accept such tales. In that wild country any number of these tribes could wander unseen.

In 1978, bushwalker Steve Curtis, while fighting his way through valley scrub north-west of Kurrajong, spotted smoke rising through trees ahead of him. Believing it to be another hiking party's fire he pushed on in that direction. Finally reaching the spot, he found before him three crude bark shelters. A few stone implements {which he salvaged} littered the cleared area about which were also numerous little bare human footprints. It was apparent that his noisy approach had alerted the occupants of what looked to be a modern say stone-age camp. Steve soon had the uneasy feeling that he was being watched from the surrounding forest, so he hastily left the area