| Abstract: |
A little over sixty years ago, the first modern Norman B. Tindale in south Australia. In 1937 Tindale drew attention to the resemblance between some prehistoric Australian stone artifacts and tools found in Southeast Asia, specifically "sumatra-type implements" which he described as characteristic of the "Upper Palaeolithic of Malaya". Frederick D. McCarthy, a contemporary scholar, argued however that these and other stone artifacts found in Australian sites were typical Hoabinhian types, considered then to be Mesolithic rather than Paleolithic. Both Tindale and McCarthy argued that the perceived similarities reflected a direct historical relationhsip between Southeast Asia and Australia. During the 1960s and 1970s some Australian scholars (Matthews, Lampert, McBryde) carried out detailed metrical studies of Australian tool assemblages and compared them to Hoabinhian assemblages. In general it was agreed that while resemblances existed, no culture-historical conclusions could be drawn. Furthermore, it is now generally agreed that the Hoabinhian is of terminal pleistocene age, while there is clear evidence for an early Australian human colonization before 40,000 BP. In this paper, I discuss whether the resemblances are more apparent then real
due to the constraints of shared technological limitations
or whether there is indeed some kind of culture-historical relationship.
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