Alternative History #8: Ancient East Indian Settlement of Australia

For the previous installment, see Alternative History #7: German-Led Native Shock Troops in California.

I've often wondered why Australia wasn't colonized by Chinese, or Indonesians, or Maori, prior to Europeans. Approaching from the north, Chinese and Indonesians would have encountered horrendous impenetrable swamps crawling with saltwater crocodiles. The Maoris might have had an easier time landing in what is now Victoria or New South Wales, but they only arrived in Aotearoa five centuries before Europeans. But if the Aboriginal Australians themselves made it to Australia 60,000 years ago, how hard could it be for someone who had an actual boat? Why not Indian explorers or traders? Even in that early era it's likely the Asians would have had substantially more advanced stone tools and stoneworking techniques than the Australians, which they would have introduced and which would have quickly spread through trade and warfare. Australia might also have been colonized by non-native fauna that they brought with them - non-marsupial mammals that would stick out against the evolutionary background of the isolated continent.

Once again, this isn't alternate history. I recently ran across a paper by Irina Pugach, working in Mark Stoneking's lab at Max Planck, showing genetic evidence of contact around four to five thousand years ago. Most intriguing, this is nearly simultaneous with a change in aboriginal stone tools and the introduction of dingoes to the continent. It's very hard to believe that's a coincidence. (Disclosure, for a year I worked for Stoneking as an undergrad, on a project showing the mtDNA evidence supporting a Polynesian origin for the settlers of Madagascar. This was with radioactive sequencing. If you could get 200 clean bp every 2 days, you were a wizard. I got a Howard Hughes monetary award for it in a research fair, not a grant.)

REFERENCE Pugach I, Delfin F, Gunnarsdóttir E, Kayser M, Stoneking M. Genome-wide data substantiate Holocene gene flow from India to Australia. PNAS January 29, 2013 110 (5) 1803-1808; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211927110