Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Crabtree, Stefani A
• White, Devin A
• Bradshaw, Corey J A
• Saltré, Frédérik
• Williams, Alan N
• Beaman, Robin J
• Bird, Michael I
• Ulm, Sean

Titel

Landscape rules predict optimal superhighways for the first peopling of Sahul

Ist Teil von

• Nature human behaviour, 2021-10, Vol.5 (10), p.1303-1313

Ort / Verlag

England

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Archaeological data and demographic modelling suggest that the peopling of Sahul required substantial populations, occurred rapidly within a few thousand years and encompassed environments ranging from hyper-arid deserts to temperate uplands and tropical rainforests. How this migration occurred and how humans responded to the physical environments they encountered have, however, remained largely speculative. By constructing a high-resolution digital elevation model for Sahul and coupling it with fine-scale viewshed analysis of landscape prominence, least-cost pedestrian travel modelling and high-performance computing, we create over 125 billion potential migratory pathways, whereby the most parsimonious routes traversed emerge. Our analysis revealed several major pathways-superhighways-transecting the continent, that we evaluated using archaeological data. These results suggest that the earliest Australian ancestors adopted a set of fundamental rules shaped by physiological capacity, attraction to visually prominent landscape features and freshwater distribution to maximize survival, even without previous experience of the landscapes they encountered.