Wednesday, May 22, 2024

Timor came late

Humans crossed the Wallace Line not-long after leaving east Africa / Yemen, and then got to Australia. But how? One island on the way is Timor. Timor had nobody 59-54 BP (57-52kBC). Then 42kBC it got some people.

I am not as surprised this month as I might have been before December, looking into the latitude. Timor (-Leste) is a seasonally-wet island today like Barbados, and in those Pleistocene millennia I expect it was mostly-desert. Humans fresh off Sunda will not be trained to handle the Dry Season.

Humans living around the monsoons for another dozen millennia might make a better go of it - which it seems they did; the settlement was done by a large group, as islanders go. Meanwhile islands further north got more-regular rain so the earlier less-focused Sundalanders could hit up what's our New Guinea, northern Sahul then.

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