暢談世界文化:4 土著人來啦 (1/2)

I'm writing a paper on early civilizations. I've decided to focus on the Australian aborigines. Sounds good. I'd love to do some extra reading on this topic. I'm not sure exactly what to write. Let's begin at the beginning. Australia may well be the home of the world's first people. Stone tools discovered in 1971 show that humans lived in Australia at least 12,000 years before they appeared in Europe. I read that so far three early sites have been discovered in Australia, the Penrith one being dated about 47,000 years old, a Western Australian site 40,000 years old and another in Lake Mungo, New South Wales, 35,000 years old. That means there have been in excess of 1,850 generations of aboriginals! I never thought of it that way. Let's look at their culture, too. More than 30,000 years ago the population of the world was small, and people lived in family groups, hunting, fishing and food gathering. At that time there were no cultivated crops, animals were not herded for food and metalworking was yet to be discovered.