The Boat of Millions of Years

Australia was settled about 74000 years ago, long before the Homo sapiens diaspora into Europe and Asia, the settlers being driven from East Africa by the famine and the years of darkness that followed the Toba super-eruption. You can read about it here. The Paleolithic pioneers crossed the Indian ocean in dug-out canoes, provisioned with edible seedpods from the Baobab tree to nourish them along the voyage. In the absence of existing Australian immigration paranoias they were forced to intern themselves for six months on Christmas Island. Also, obligatory “Six Months in a Leaking Boat” reference.

Responses to the theory have been mixed.

The hidebound Australian establishment has only scorn and hostility for autodidact amateurs!

However, it does explain why the North Australian species of baobab Adansonia gregorii is so closely related to the Madagascan variety, which otherwise requires the transportation of a seedpod by an African swallow. Or two European swallows: one at the front and one at the back.

Baobab: An annoyingly non-palindromal name

I have tried to persuade the others that the next Riddled fund-raising cruise should be a re-enactment of this epic voyage. It would be in the tradition of the Kon-Tiki expedition. It would assure us a place in the annals of history and a permanent exhibition in the Bunnythorpe Seafarers’ and Dockers’ Guild Hall and Museum.

Alas, only the library pixies are keen, and have already chosen their costumes. Everyone else is all no-enthusiasm, and tigris has remembered she gets seasick.


Evidence for the African boat-people hypothesis? You want evidence? Note the similarities between the rock-art of the Sandawe culture in Tanzania and the long-vanished Bradshaw culture of the Kimberley region, a.k.a. Gwion Gwion.* In both traditions, magic-mushroom visions – filtered through a world-view of shamanism – inspired artists to paint people with pancakes on their heads.
Whatever the plausibility of the theory, I rate for any research program that allows vision scientists to speculate in an optometry journal about drug experiences.**

* Chapman insisted on calling them the Lucy culture, at a time when he and Keats shared a brief enthusiasm for anthropology, and neither of them was particularly clear on the concept of ‘Homo habilis’.

** Inevitably Keats responded that “It’s a Lucy nation!”.