The development of Sahul agriculture with Australia as bystander

Abstract

The distribution of food-plants—both potential and actually exploited — reflects the natural history of contact across the seas and through the region, often long before Pleistocene times. The later and the human contribution has to be discerned from varied lines of evidence. The inventive process of early domestication leading to cultivation in the Sahulian north (New Guinea) was not a part of plant adaptation in the south (Australia). Neither did species diffusion result in adoption of agriculture or stimulation towards domestication among the Aboriginal hunter-gatherers.

Crops and Cultures in the Pacific: New data and new techniques for the investigation of old questions

“…Hard endocarps of coconut, Canarium and Pandanus are present, sometimes in quantity, in geographically widely separated sites. Fragments of pods of Inocarpus and seeds of Pometia are also not uncommon (Kirch, 1989;Yen, 1995;Matthews and Gosden, 1997). However, there is as yet no macroscopic record of those staples of present-day indigenous Melanesian agriculture; the aroids (especially taro, Colocasia esculenta) and yams (Dioscorea spp.…”

“…Yen (1995) argued that western Melanesia was an independent center of agricultural origin, from which Oceanic agricultural systems based on root and tree crops were derived. On the other hand, Spriggs (1996) considered that Melanesia was not a center of agricultural development, although prehistoric Melanesian hunter-gatherers may have had a long tradition of transplanting useful species within and between islands.…”

“…However, the range of endocarp dimensions in wild C. indicum (or its progenitor) was not given, possibly because, as Matthews and Gosden (1997) point out, Canarium is dispersed by flying foxes and fruit pigeons, both of which are quite capable of moving seeds from planted trees back into the wild and vice versa, making it difficult to identify truly wild populations. Canarium has also been recovered from late Pleistocene sites in Manus and the Solomon Islands (Yen, 1995) and Spriggs (1996) stated that Canarium was transplanted from New Guinea to New Ireland and Buka Island at the beginning of the Holocene, though he gave no reason for discounting natural long-distance dispersal. Even in Lapita sites, where C. indicum is abundantly represented (Kirch, 1989;Matthews and Gosden, 1997), it is not possible to distinguish between exploitation, cultivation and domestication.…”

“…Phytoliths often cannot be identified to species, only to genus or family, and their morphology cannot, at least as yet, be used to discriminate between wild versus domesticated forms of a crop species. Thus, rice phytoliths from 7-8000 years ago in a valley in Thailand (Kealhofer and Piperno, 1994) and Musa phytoliths from the earliest levels of the Kuk site in highland New Guinea (cited in Yen, 1995) do not necessarily indicate cultivation of rice or banana, since wild relatives of these two crops still occur in the respective areas Starch grains have, like pollen but perhaps more surprisingly, proved resistant to decay. Barton et al (1998) examined a sample of artefacts from an open site in Papua New Guinea and found starch grains on all, whether they had been used or not.…”

“…whether or what genetic changes became fixed in populations associated with man), whether domestication is always a significant or necessary stage in the origin of agriculture (Spriggs, 1996), and to what extent arboriculture (Kirch, 1989) can be considered agriculture (which in the literal sense is cultivation of fields), will no doubt remain subjects for debate. However, molecular studies on living crops may provide evidence that the archaeobotanical record cannot on whether manipulation of the tree crops important to the Lapita, and domestication of other crops such as bananas, sugarcane, taro and yam, started in Melanesia (Gosden, 1992;Yen 1995) or further west in South-east Asia (Bellwood, 1996), hence closer to the site of Sauer's original hearth (Sauer, 1952).…”