The problem of the Australians

The (aboriginal) Australians worry me.

These folks settled their continent 40 thousand years ago -- or, as many scholars now believe, 65 thousand years ago.

Yet in all that time, they failed to develop beyond the old stone age. They developed no agriculture, metal, or permanent settlements. They scarcely even had clothing.

If Australia had not been discovered from outside, there is every reason to suppose its inhabitants might have remained at the stone age level for ever more -- or until the sun burned itself out.

It is frightening to think that a branch of the human species could have continued in this way forever, never realising its potential, and never knowing anything of the science and technology we have developed.

If the Australians had been typical of humanity as a whole, the human story would have looked something like this...

We can attempt to explain the Australians' lack of development in terms of dark age theory.

Scale (a measure of interactivity) is a critical determinant of a society's institutional and technological complexity. Low-scale societies are inevitably simple, as small groups of isolated people cannot support elaborate economies and political systems. Stuck at the end of the world's main landmass, and separated from it by a lengthy sea-crossing, Australia experienced low scale. It was exposed to few influences. The effective size of the population within reach, i.e. the scale, was too low to sustain development beyond paleolithic levels.

We can refine this argument. For an isolated region, scale depends on the population contained within that region. But the population that exists within the region depends on the technological level (because sophisticated food-production techniques support more people on the same amount of land). And the technological level depends on the scale. What appears to have happened in Australia is that humans achieved an equilibrium, or eigenmode, where technology supported a population that generated enough scale to support that level of technology...and no more. This eigenmode, i.e. self-consistent solution to the problems of social existence, was quite stable and there was no reason why the Australians should ever have broken out of it.

This argument suggests several points of concern:

1. New Guinea is also small and isolated, yet its inhabitants achieved the neolithic level, unlike the Australians. New Guinea was actually joined to Australia, as the continent of Sahul, until about ten thousand years ago, so why did the Australians not achieve the sophistication of New Guinea? The Polynesian islands are even smaller and even more isolated, yet many had chiefdoms, surpassing New Guinea in sophistication, let alone Australia. We might be able to explain this in terms of humans bringing the relevant technologies and institutions to these islands, so that they were already in a more complex eigenmode. But why were people not able to carry this eigenmode to Australia?
2. If Australia was too small to support developmental growth like that of the Afro-Eurasian and American world islands, it suggests that, had the world's landmass been more broken up than it is, then humans would not have been able to develop anywhere. The fact that humans have developed must then be seen, in part, as a geographical accident, not an inevitable result of human talents.
3. Australia is a big place. If we are saying Australia was too small, then just how big does a continent have to be before humans are able to develop beyond the paleolithic? It is true that Australia has large areas of desert, but the Nile Valley is surrounded by desert. And climatic conditions in Australia have changed a lot over the millennia. Why could civilisation not have developed along the valleys of Australia's Orange or Murray-Darling rivers? If we are saying environmental conditions here were never quite right, then just how flukey was the development of civilisation elsewhere?
4. If Australia reached equilibrium at a technological level commensurate with its size, then could this be the fate of the world as a whole? Will we stagnate at a (much higher) technological level where the planet is able to support just enough population to sustain that level of technology? Could the human race flat-line until the sun goes supernova or something else wipes us out?

The point of these questions is not to deny that Australia's lack of development can be related to its situation, but to show some of the complicating issues that a full theory must take into account and be able to explain.

We should also note two other points:

1. There is no reason to think, as some might, that the aboriginal Australians lacked the mental capacity of humans elsewhere. All humans today are members of a single species, descended from common ancestors living at most 100-200,000 years ago. On an individual level, aboriginal Australians operate perfectly competently in technologically advanced society; high achieving aborigines include academics, politicians and writers. Australian traditional culture is also sophisticated in its own way; languages and kinship systems are more complex than those of 'advanced' societies; art and mythology are well developed; the boomerang is a clever device; aborigines found honey by gluing feathers to bees, slowing them down so they could be followed. [As far as dark age theory is concerned, the sameness of humans everywhere and at all times is axiomatic. Only when it has proved impossible to build an adequate theory of history on that assumption will the axiom need to be abandoned - we are nowhere near that yet.]
2. Australians seem to have taken up agriculture at various points, then abandoned it again. Therefore, the situation is not as simple as achievement of an everlasting equilibrium. Stagnation was not total, and perhaps changing climatic conditions sometimes elevated scale sufficiently to promote development in some areas.

Finally, there is the argument of Jared Diamond, in Guns, germs and steel, which is that the move to neolithic (farming) lifestyles depended on the availability of crop plants and domesticable animals. While Eurasia had barley/wheat/rice on the one hand and sheep/cattle/horses/pigs on the other, suitable equivalents in the rest of the world were lacking.

Diamond's argument comes back to the issue of continental size. There is a well-known relationship between the size of an island/landmass and its biodiversity. Hence, the largest continent, with the greatest biodiversity, inevitably had the most suitable species for agriculture. The second largest continent was a runner up, while the smallest continent had too litte variety to provide species with the right characteristics for human exploitation.

This argument is not endorsed by dark age theory, which starts from the assumption that history is a sociological phenomenon, not dictated by random background features such as climatic conditions or availability of domesticable species. In dark age theory, necessity is the mother of invention, so that people would be expected to have found ways of supporting complex society if conditions were right for it. Diamond says attempts to use the zebra as a beast of burden have failed, which he suggests helps explain Africa's lack of development. However, over thousands of years the zebra might have been domesticated as the horse was, had people really needed such an animal. Dark age theory looks for explanations in terms of the inherent logic of human affairs, not in terms of chance, external factors. (This viewpoint may be wrong, but we start from it as an assumption, to be abandoned only when it has demonstrably failed.)