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

Religious Adherents: Bad Stripe Not Visible, But Is This Data Meaningful?

Found this map at Perell.com. Whenever I see cultural maps of the U.S. like this one, I look for the Bad Stripe, a coherent area that pops out as below-average in maps of human development indices. It stretches roughly from far western PA through West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee across Arkansas and into Oklahoma (see more here.) My expectation would be higher religious belief across the Bad Stripe; or, at least, some pattern that makes the Bad Stripe stick out from surrounding areas. Not present at all; and typically, lower human development = more religious. Bad Stripe or not, there are some big surprises on this map, and it doesn't really align with both what most Americans would expect, as well as my own experience traveling and living in the country. West Virginia is much less religious than Western Pennsylvania? Really? Central California has a religious stripe across the middle? I've lived near both these places and find this hard to believe. The Frontier Strip is evident but the Rockies, especially to the north, are mostly less religious than other rural areas - also very suspicious is the similar level of religiousness between rural and coastal areas of Pacific states. If California is going to have religious and unreligious zones, they're more likely to run north and south parallel to the (liberal, likely less religious) coast.

One problem across all such surveys is that how one defines "religious" (or in this case "religious adherents") matters a great deal. Was it something like asking "How important is religion to you?" Or "Do you belong to a church?" Looking at this map, I strongly suspect it was the second, and that many people in some area (eg West Virginia) that do not belong or regularly attend services would say that religion is quite important to them. A place that happens to have a single large church would look very religious, whereas a place where people were very religious but did not have many churches would look very un-religious.