WI: No Australian Aboriginal settlement

By some occurrence, Aboriginal people never settle Australia/Sahul. What would happen to the continent without them? How would European settlement be different? Would settlement by others be more successful or less successful?
 
Not going to happen. This would require a massive geological PoD to move Australia way out into the Pacific or remove the entire Indonesian archipelago or some such. Even then, it's ridiculously improbable.

Polynesians settled every habitable island in the central Pacific; including New Zealand.
Austronesians made it all the way to Madagascar.
New Guinea is also anciently inhabited, and right next door.

Moreover, Australia was settled 40-50kya, probably in the first sweep of modern humans out of Africa. Humans didn't get to the Americans until much, much later.
 
Melanesians (maybe Polynesians) would probably settle the east coast, Malays would likely settle the northern coast, the inside would be too harsh to be appealing for these settlers to live in.
 
Melanesians (maybe Polynesians) would probably settle the east coast, Malays would likely settle the northern coast, the inside would be too harsh to be appealing for these settlers to live in.
Would there be a higher level of civilization in this scenario than in OTL?
 
No human settlement of Australia also means no human settlement of New Guinea, since they were one continent up until ~10,000 years ago. This in turn means no Melanesian settlement of the points further east: Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia etc, and also probably of the Moluccas west of New Guinea.

This is all highly improbable, given how far back it happened (40-60,000 years ago, depending on which source you believe). But let's handwave away the problems. Say, the first humans who reached the area of what is now OTL Java etc never developed decent watercraft, and got stuck there. So let it be, for the sake of argument.

That just means that the next wave of humans who passes through will settle the place. An empty land is much more appealing than an already-settled one. An uninhabited Australia will also be more appealing on its northern coastline - it was human activities which wiped out the megafauna and made the north much drier. The monsoonal zone will be much larger across northern Australia without human settlement, not to mention all of the megafauna offering easy hunting. So whichever wave of humans comes through next will have a fun time.

The Austronesian expansion circa 4000 years ago would settle the place. So, possibly, would be the hypothesised influx of people carrying Dravidian genes, ultimately from South India but probably stopping somewhere along the way, which has also been suggested by some recent genetic studies.

So what you would have would be, well, the closest analogue would be a much larger Madagascar, though only with Austronesian/Dravidian settlement and none from Africa. Interesting place, but but no means uninhabited.
 
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raharris1973

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it was human activities which wiped out the megafauna and made the north much drier.

So what activities were they - killing megafauna for meat and trees for firewood and watercraft was enough to dessicate the land?
 
Impossible. As a proponent of Oppenheimer's settlement scenario of Sunda and Sahul the foundation of Oceania's inhabitation relies on the Spice Islands deep history of maritime travel.

In essence you're gonna have to butterfly Sunda populations. Austronesian expansion is in essence rooted in this very ancient "Papuan" population that provided the basis of technological innovation that populates Oceania and Madagascar given the "Polynesian" motifs found in those regions not found in Western SEA, this is telling given the Polynesian motif found in Madagascar but not Malaysia and Western and Central Indonesia.

Oceanic Migration: Paths, Sequence, Timing and Range of Prehistoric Migration in the Pacific and Indian Oceans
by Charles E. M. Pearce and F. M. Pearce discusses this theory.
 
No way Australia will have no Aboriginals. Not with Indonesia and New Gunea as next door neighbors. Not with Polynesians,Melanesians and Micronesians exploring all of Oceania and settling every uninhabited island they could. It's as ludicrous as the Americas being free of human inhabitants by the time of Columbus.
 
@ Revachah, it should be noted that Pearce's hypothesis is not the most widely accepted explanation of Oceanian settlement. In particular, I'm interested how you would justify the statement that
Spice trading was probably an early driving factor [in overseas settlement]. We have suggested that a trading route to Japan may have been earliest, the settlement of Palau nearly 6,000 years ago a conceivable indicator for the establishment of such a route.​
When we have no archaeological evidence of major trade in Maluku (i.e. foreign manufactured goods; there are virtually no Indian artifacts in Maluku, and there are no pre-Tang Chinese goods) until less than 2,000 years ago, much later than in western Indonesia. In fact, the spice trade was negligible enough that the clove islands (Ternate and Tidore, for instance) were uninhabited until c. 1250, and even then we have a contemporaneous source suggesting that maritime trade was unimportant early in Ternaten history.
In the beginning the island [of Ternate] was undeveloped and only very lightly populated. The earliest settlement was Tobona, which was located on top of the mountain and founded by a headsman named Guna. One day as Guna went to the forests to tap the sugar palm to make toddy, he came across a golden mortar and pestle. [...] [It was given] to Cico, head of the coastal village of Sampalu.​
Tobona is an inland town, not a port like historical Ternaten capitals were. This tale, collected in the 1720s, would seem to suggest that early settlement in Ternate was not maritime oriented.

Although cloves and other Malukan spices were certainly known in the wider Eurasian world as early as the second millennium BC, archaeology and oral history in Maluku itself strongly suggests that they were only rarely and indirectly traded until c. 1400. It is very unlikely the spice trade could have been a major "early driving factor" in much of anything.
 
So what activities were they - killing megafauna for meat and trees for firewood and watercraft was enough to dessicate the land?
I'm summarising lots of individual bits of research (this is planned to make it into a TL of mine if I ever finish LORAG and ITWP), but the short version is that the presence of large browsers keeps down the undergrowth, limits fires, and also produces a lot of ongoing manure as fertiliser. This allows the maintenance of denser forests, which in turns means more transpiration of water, and therefore more rainfall, producing an overall wetter climate. There's a couple of places where the fossil record is very detailed and allows a demonstration that when the megafauna went extinct, with 100 years the vegetation changed from dense forests of fire-sensitive species to open sclerophyll woodlands of the more fire tolerant species (Eucalytpus, Casuarina etc). The regular fires in that kind of biome stops dense woodlands from re-appearing.

The other line of evidence is that during previous interglacial periods, the monsoonal belt in northern Australia was much larger than it was now, both in terms of how far it went along the coast (much further down past the Kimberleys in Western Australia, for instance), how much further inland in penetrated, and how much rainfall. During the glacial periods the monsoons retreated, but every interglacial they came back again. The difference was that in the current interglacial, unlike the previous 17-20, the monsoons never really came back very much, except right in Arnhem Land and a little bit along the coast of the Kimberleys and the Gulf of Carpentaria. The difference in vegetation meant that there isn't enough recycling of water (via transpiration, wetlands etc) for the monsoons to return.

Keep the megafauna somehow - whether through no humans, or some other PoD - and northern Australia looks very little like it does now.
 
@ Revachah, it should be noted that Pearce's hypothesis is not the most widely accepted explanation of Oceanian settlement. In particular, I'm interested how you would justify the statement that
Spice trading was probably an early driving factor [in overseas settlement]. We have suggested that a trading route to Japan may have been earliest, the settlement of Palau nearly 6,000 years ago a conceivable indicator for the establishment of such a route.​
When we have no archaeological evidence of major trade in Maluku (i.e. foreign manufactured goods; there are virtually no Indian artifacts in Maluku, and there are no pre-Tang Chinese goods) until less than 2,000 years ago, much later than in western Indonesia. In fact, the spice trade was negligible enough that the clove islands (Ternate and Tidore, for instance) were uninhabited until c. 1250, and even then we have a contemporaneous source suggesting that maritime trade was unimportant early in Ternaten history.
In the beginning the island [of Ternate] was undeveloped and only very lightly populated. The earliest settlement was Tobona, which was located on top of the mountain and founded by a headsman named Guna. One day as Guna went to the forests to tap the sugar palm to make toddy, he came across a golden mortar and pestle. [...] [It was given] to Cico, head of the coastal village of Sampalu.​
Tobona is an inland town, not a port like historical Ternaten capitals were. This tale, collected in the 1720s, would seem to suggest that early settlement in Ternate was not maritime oriented.

Although cloves and other Malukan spices were certainly known in the wider Eurasian world as early as the second millennium BC, archaeology and oral history in Maluku itself strongly suggests that they were only rarely and indirectly traded until c. 1400. It is very unlikely the spice trade could have been a major "early driving factor" in much of anything.

The Spice Islands, that is the islands that were never a part of either Sahul or Sunda. Not the people we have recorded down as traders of nutmeg.

The basis of exploration and the expansion of ocean going craft is extremely ancient in that part of the world. We have evidence of Colocasia esculenta far beyond its natural range in the Solomon islands some 28kya, we have evidence of fish hooks and pelagic fish explotation some 42kya in Timor, we have evidence of cold-adaptions reach its peak within Polynesian populations relating to an extremely ancient selection pressure of cold oceanic travel, there is much evidence pointing to Pearce's and Oppenheimer's theories. My talking of the islands and the ancient populations involved do not necessarily have pure or representational modern peoples (Which is why I put Papuan in quotations)
 
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