No Humans find Australia ...

Because we'd shoot them.


The lonely settler wanders the bush, gun in hand, searching for the largest predator bird in existence. The cunning creature meanwhile sits high upon his pearch. When he spots the human wandering he gets into a ready postion before silently swooping down at 50mph on the unprepeared settler. The settler friegtened by the sight of the massive bird drops his gun just before the predator sinks his claws into him.

Still think the humans have a chance:cool:
 
They hunt massive birds why wouldn't humans be preceived as prey?
Because Europeans would quickly drive them to extinction?Lone settlers would be easy prey, but a group of settlers armed with guns (and remember, guns didn't figure into it until the arrival of humans) would spell the end of these things.
 

Flubber

Banned
Still think the humans have a chance:cool:


At the end of the Last Ice there was a bear species in Europe the size of modern day kodiaks; 600kg, 250cm long, 140cm tall. Humans at the time were armed with stone-tipped spears. Both species used caves to winter over in.

Care to guess which species is now extinct? :rolleyes:
 
Settlement is actually pretty hard and the British colonisation of New Zealand only really took off in the late 1840s/early 1850s, over half a century since contact was made and kept. In that intervening period the British had a long acclimatisation with the country, with the help of local Maori, many of which developed their agriculture with a view to supplying both the British coastal stations and the developing NSW markets.

Without any humans in NZ the British have a much harder time of it and they will know that. They may well still settle, but given economics being what it is, they equally may dither for a while.
 
God, I do love these threads.

Chances are, some group of people from Indonesia will probably end up settling there anyways. It's not like Australia was completely isolated from the rest of the world like many people here think it was.
 
Because Europeans would quickly drive them to extinction?Lone settlers would be easy prey, but a group of settlers armed with guns (and remember, guns didn't figure into it until the arrival of humans) would spell the end of these things.


Please their punny weapons will be usless against them. They will come like Swordfish dive bombers and the bullets will be ineffective. Just like bullets hitting swordfish bombers they will be useless, unless they hit something vitale .:cool:

on another note do Moa's have any potentail use for farming purposes, pulling stuff or riding?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa
 
Please their punny weapons will be usless against them. They will come like Swordfish dive bombers and the bullets will be ineffective. Just like bullets hitting swordfish bombers they will be useless, unless they hit something vitale .:cool:

on another note do Moa's have any potentail use for farming purposes, pulling stuff or riding?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa

I would doubt it. They were apparently slow moving, slow growing, and they generally kept their heads down for feeding. So it's not likely that they would make a good domesticate.
 
I would doubt it. They were apparently slow moving, slow growing, and they generally kept their heads down for feeding. So it's not likely that they would make a good domesticate.

I think that creatures like the Moa have little prospects of success outside of being discovered by a late era society that has both the will and the means to protect the creature. Or revive it.

NZ currently spends a fair amount of effort on protecting or restoring endangered bird species and even with our technology and historically generous budgets (although the recession has hurt that) it is a real struggle that may be futile in the long run.
 
I've actually recently been going over ways to create an empty Polynesia, and I think it may work with this.

Perhaps with the first human migration across the water to New Guinea failing, Australia and its surrounding islands remain empty for thousands of years. Then, Austronesians arrive as per OTL-but finding the large, empty island of New Guinea, instead of continuing their island hopping they colonize this Terra Nullis.

With a lot of open land, they eventually lose their shipbuilding and navigational technology-because why sail around when you can just move a few miles away from your village when it gets crowded? The first settlers may transport plantains to the other Austronesian colonies (so the banana is still created and domesticated as per OTL, minimizing butterflies) before they lose their technology, but that's it.

Fast forward to the modern era, and New Guinea is colonized, as well as a few surrounding islands populated by drift voyages. Australia was never colonized, as unlike the hunting Melanesians the farming Austronesians found the land too dry for their purposes. The largest human impact on Australia might be the introduction of dogs which strayed from the tentative and unsuccessful Austronesian explorations, but there is no permanent human population in the entirety of Australia or the Pacific east of the Solomon Islands.

It is an empty ocean, at least until the equivalent of the Age of Exploration begins and people begin sailing across the Pacific from the Americas...

EDIT: Then again, it is possible that the Austronesians would give up farming, especially since if they reached Australia they would have already had to settle areas of New Guinea in which anything but the horticulture of sago palms is impossible, and the jump from that to hunting/gathering is pretty small. Still, I think an empty Australia absorbing the Austronesian expansion and leading to an empty Polynesia/Micronesia is possible and an interesting idea.
 
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