No continent, like Australia, was inhabited entirely, until the century. XIX forwarded by primitive peoples. Such a recent occupation of the hunting territories of Australia’s indigenous peoples allowed a careful study of their customs before their culture was suffocated by that of the colonizers. But, due to the particular configuration of the continent, the primitive tribes had no shelter against the settler. In South America, four centuries after the first European occupation, there still remain, in the forests of the Amazon, a large number of indigenous people almost immune to the influence of the Whites. In Australia, on the other hand, there are no dense forests, except the eastern strip, and all the open woods and savannahs where the natives lived were already sixty years after the first settling of settlers. For Australia 2016, please check softwareleverage.org.

A second aspect of the environment should be briefly considered: that is, although Australia is today entirely a region of either desert or arid savannahs or open eucalyptus forests, there is also reason to believe that these dry climatic conditions did not cover in past the whole continent. It is almost certain that the Darling Basin in New South Wales, and other southern regions of arid Australia, had a greater abundance of rain in the Quaternary epoch and offered more food than now, and no doubt Australia was already inhabited by man in very ancient periods of that era. On the other hand, it seems that at the beginning of the contacts with the Europeans, in the century. XVIII, the most numerous indigenous tribes occupied the best regions of the continent, that is, the eastern and south-eastern districts. Recent research shows that there were probably never many natives in the arid region. FC Clapp, p. eg, discussing their number in the western desert, he thinks there were never more than 2000 in the immense area of ​​1,500,000 sq km. The inductions, therefore, based on the links between Australian culture and the arid regime of the environment, on which various ethnologists have focused, must be considered with great caution. Equally untenable is the opinion, expressed in some old books, that Australia was the cradle of mankind (Schoetensack, Klaatsch), despite the lack of any superior mammal in it.

The Australian breed itself (to use the usual collective term) appears to have had its origins outside Australia.

Origin and affinity. – The Australians, in fact, fall into a group of human varieties with an elongated head, dark skin color and broad nose, due to their physical type, which however differ from true blacks in the structure of the face and long, wavy hair. Of this primitive Australoid group there are numerous residues from northern India to Australia, as has already been demonstrated by Biasutti and others: the Panyan and Santal of the jungles of India, the Vedda of Ceylon, the Senoi of Malacca, the Toala by Celebes. These Asian tribes are small in stature, while the Australians are generally taller, especially in the north-west; but, despite this and some other differences, the current dissemination of the Australoid peoples gives a sure indication of the path followed by the human migrations that led to the first population of the

The problem is complicated by the presence of dark, frizzy-haired races in the north and south of the continent: the Tasmanians (now extinct) and the Papuans. What, then, was the distribution of the land and the sea when this migration took place? Why are there no Australians mixed with Papuans in neighboring New Guinea? Which human type is taller, the Australian or the Papuan?