p Suncta Land, which once connected the Indonesian islands with the Asian continent, was not the only paleogeographic land mass in that part of the world. To the south lay another continent, Sahul, of which New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania are the unsubmerged portions. These two continents were connected 50 million years ago by a land bridge which later sank beneath the water. The boundary line between Sunda Land and Sahul, or between the Oriental and Australian regions, was established by Darwin’s associate Alfred Wallace. Although Wallace was not an oceanographer or a geologist, both oceanographers and geologists agree with him.

p Investigating the geographical distribution of animals in South-East Asia, Wallace found that the eastern boundary ran between the islands of Bali and Lombok, then across the Makassar Strait between Borneo and Celebes, skirting the Philippines’from the west and north-west. Asian 107 animals did not go beyond that boundary (known with perfect justice as Wallace’s line), for their way was barred by a narrow belt of sea. " Wallace’s line" is the boundary between the Oriental and the Australian regions.

p This water barrier proved insurmountable to land animals. What about man? The answer to this question helps to clarify a problem that was debated for more than 150 years, namely, how Australia, the fifth continent, was peopled. When Europeans discovered Australia they found that the aborigines there had no navigational skills. Neither, evidently, had their forefathers. How, then, had the latter reached Australia, cut off as it is from the rest of the world? Or had they lived there since time immemorial, since the rise of Homo sapiens?

p A member of the great Russian Antarctic expedition of 1819-21, Ivan Simonov, suggested that the Australian aborigines were descendants of people who had come from India, members of the lowest castes. Robert Fitzroy, in command of the famous Beagle, advanced the hypothesis that the Australians were descendants of Africans. According to a third hypothesis, the Australian aborigines were the original Homo sapiens, and it was from Australia that man moved out to settle the rest of the world. Today all three hypotheses possess only historical interest. Most modern scholars consider it as proved that man originally came to Australia from South-East Asia. The direct ancestors of the Australian aborigines developed on the territory of Sunda Land in the last Ice Age. This is shown by the similarity between the oldest skulls unearthed on Java and Borneo and in Indo-China, and the oldest skulls found in Australia, and also by the 108 fact that stone implements discovered in Indonesia are fashioned in the style and traditions of the most archaic stone implements of Australia.

p Excavations reveal that people were living in Southeastern Australia 18,000 years ago. Since migration was from the north, from South-East Asia and Sunda, the first men must have reached Australia at least 20,000 years ago. It was not Australia as we know it, but Sahul Land, which disintegrated into New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania 10,000 years ago, at the end of the glacial epoch.

p “The peopling of Australia was a long and haphazard process,” writes V. Kaho, a Soviet expert on Australia. "The first small groups of proto-Australoids made their way across New Guinea and directly across the coastal regions, now vanished, of Sahul Land. Gradually increasing in numbers as they spread southwards, they set foot on the land of present-day Australia somewhere near the Cape York peninsula.” Kabo believes that "the peopling of Australia started from the northern coast of Sahul Land, which is now under water. This means that the oldest traces of man’s presence there are buried beneath water.”

p Underwater archeology thus has another fascinating job—a search for traces of the first inhabitants of Australia at the bottom of the straits along which Wallace’s line runs, on the floor of the Torres Strait, separating New Guinea from Australia, and on the floor of the shallow Timor Sea, between the Island of Timor and Australia, where the water is no deeper than 42 metres.

p The latest oceanographic and geological 109 findings show lh.it during lhi> last Ice Age the ocean level was 110 metres lower than it is today. If it were 45 metres lower than today there would be solid land from the Malay Peninsula to Bali and the Island of Palawan in the Philippines. If the ocean level were only 18 metres lower than it is today there would be a bridge of land between New Guinea and Australia in the region of the Torres Strait. Such a land bridge did exist, and it vanished, says Australian oceanographer Jennings, only 7,000 or 8,000 years ago.

p In liis monograph The Origin and Early History of the Australian Aborigines, Kabo writes: "The last maximum of the Wurm glaciation in both hemispheres took place from 20,000 to 27,000 years ago, says Zeuner. Hence, the beginning of the glaciation almost coincides with the period during which, according to our data, man came to Australia. But some of the straits still existed at that time. Using their primitive rafts or logs, people crossed one strait after another and gradually reached Sahul Land across Java, they went across the Lesser Sunda Islands and Timor Island into Northwestern and Northern Australia, or across Sulawesi (Celebes), the Tenimbar Islands, the Aru Islands, Ceram Island, Halmaheira Island and New Guinea into Northern and Northeastern Australia. This slow and haphazard process may have lasted thousands of years.”

p Primitive man accomplished what the tigers, orangutans and other animals of South-East Asia had been unable to do. On rafts and logs he crossed the narrow straits separating Sunda from Sahul and stepped onto Australian soil. When the glacial period ended and the level of 110 the ocean rose, many islands and land vanished beneath the waves, and the Australians were completely isolated from the rest of the world until European seafarers discovered them 10,000 or 12.000 years later.

p The "Australian riddle" has thus been solved through the co-operation of anthropology, / oogeography, geography, archeology and geology. Perhaps these sciences will help us to find the key to another, still more mysterious riddle of ancient history—the origin of the indigenous inhabitants of Tasmania.

p If we go by their stone tools, the Tasmanians were the most backward people in the world. While the Australians were in the Middle Stone Age, the Mesolithic period, the tools used by the Tasmanians were amazingly like those which men of the Early Stone Age used in the Old World some 40,000 or even 60,000 years ago! Stone implements are, unfortunately, our only reliable source in studying the culture of Tasmania. One of the most disgraceful wars in the history of European civilisation savagely destroyed the Tasmanians. There were only 11 Tasmanians alive in 1860, and the last pureblooded Tasmanian, a woman, died in 1876.

p How did the original inhabitants reach Tasmania? Tn the recent geological past there was a chain of islets in the shallow Bass Strait that separates Tasmania from the continent of Australia. These stepping-stones made it easy to get from the continent to the island. The southeastern part of Australia was already inhabited 180 centuries ago, when the level of the seas was much lower and people could have crossed the Bass Strait, practically, without getting their feet wet. If the level were only 54 metres lower—and 111 at that time it was all of 110 metres lower than today—Tasmania would he united with Australia. A fall in sea level by 45 metres would connect Australia with Tasmania by a chain of islets situated close to one another. It is logical to assume that when the first inhabitants of Australia reached the southern tip of the continent they continued on farther into Tasmania. Yet the now extinct Tasmanians had almost nothing in common with the Australian aborigines. They differrd from the Australians in appearance, language and cultural level.

p A number of scholars have suggested that the first inhabitants of Australia were what they call prolo-Tasmanians. Later, another group of tribes, the proto-Australians, came to Australia and began to oust the first settlers, finally driving them to Tasmania. But if this was the case, why didn’t the Australians follow them? And why have not archeologists been able to find traces of proto-Tasmanians anywhere on the Australian continent? All the finds made in Australia, no matter how far back they date, have a direct connection with today’s aborigines and their culture. This indicates that there were never any proto-Tasmanians in Australia. A people that inhabited a whole continent could not have disappeared without a trace.

p What is really astonishing, though, is that in appearance and in some features of their culture the Tasmanians resembled the inhabitants of New Caledonia, the most southern of all the islands of Melanesia, a good distance away.

p The resemblance was noted as far back as in 1847. One hundred years later the eminent Soviet archeologist and ethnographer S. Tolstov 112 suggested that when Southern Melanesia was first populated a Negroid group was carried to the coast of Tasmania by the powerful East Australian Current that runs from New Caledonia to the shores of Tasmania and then turns towards New Zealand’s South Island. This group, finding itself on a big continent-like island rich in lifesupporting resources, lost a number of features of the culture which they had developed as seafaring fishermen. The abrupt change in natural conditions, leading to changes in occupations, might have resulted in a considerable overall cultural decline.

p Yet could there have been such significant degradation that the Tasmanians, if they were descendants of the New Caledonians, lost all navigational skills (the Tasmanians did not even have the most primitive boats!) and sank back from the Late Stone Age in which the Melanesians lived into the Early Stone Age? History does not know of any cases of this kind, and they are extremely unlikely. And so, the origin of the Tasmanians still remains a mystery. Perhaps the same key that will help to solve the riddle of the peopling of Australia will help to unravel the Tasmanian puzzle.

p In a fairly recent article Australian oceanographer R. W. Fairbridge has put forward evidence to the effect that the South-West Pacific may be divided into two provinces, the remains of two large land masses, Tasmania Land and Melanesia Land. In the Tasman Sea oceanographers have discovered guyots whose summits were once above the surface. The land here may have sunk in human times. The ancestors of the Tasmanians, related to the dark-skinned inhabitants of the Melanesian islands, may have made 113 their way to Tasmania along chains of islands that have since drowned.

p They may have reached New Zealand as well. A legend about the Polynesian discovery of New Zealand says that it was inhabited by people of tall stature with flat noses and a dark skin, the very features which distinguish the Melanesians from the Polynesians. The "Black Maori" or Mariori, (a people who, like the Tasmanians, has been completely wiped out) lived on the Chatham Islands east of New Zealand until the Europeans arrived. Archeologists have found traces in the soil of New Zealand of an ancient primitive culture that differed from the Polynesian. It is known as the "moa hunters’ culture”, for the chief bird hunted by the original settlers was the gigantic running bird called the moa.

p All the archeologists, historians and philologists who study Oceania agree that the oldest inhabitants there belonged to the Negroid race. Were the oceanic islands settled thanks to land bridges that have now vanished? How far east could the first explorers have gone? When did the guyots in the Tasman Sea subside? When did the mountain chain that stretches from the southern part of Melanesia to New Zealand, and which now exists only as a wide area of shoals, disappear under the water? Was it along this ridge that the dark-skinned Melanesians made their way to New Zealand? It is up to underwater archeology to furnish the answers to these riddles of oceanography and ancient history.

p Thomas Huxley and other scholars of the middle of the last century believed that the Tasmanians came to Tasmania from New Caledonia by land which later sank into the Pacific. Today, 114 oceanographers possess data showing that separate islands and perhaps even large land masses once existed in that region.

For example, Macquario Island near Tasmania is only a small part of a vast underwater ridge. The mountains of New Zealand’s South Island and the underwater Lord Howe Range are continuations of the ridge. The entire area, from small islets like Lord Howe or Macquarie to the two large islands constituting New Zealand and even adjoining sections of the oceans have a continental crust. It is very possible that this “ semicontinent”, partially under water and partly above water, is connected with other land sections and submarine ridges south of it, in Melanesia.