ABSTRACT
When Europeans first visited the shores of Australia, they pondered the origin of Aborigines already in that land. Archaeologists have searched for evidence of how and when humans reached the continent, and their conclusions are a very different understanding of origins to the mythology and stories held by Aboriginal people. Lack of correspondence between indigenous oral traditions about the origins of humans and scientific investigations of human colonization is hardly surprising. Questions of ethnographic continuity and myth construction are revisited in Chapter 14; this chapter explores the colonization of Australia from a scientific perspective.
