The final solution down under. Tasmania.
…Strangest of all, there existed, shadowy among the ferns and gum trees, a race of human beings altogether unique, different ethnically and culturally from the aborigines of the Australian mainland, and living in secluded forest encampments, or along shellfish-strewn shores, unaffected by contact with any other men and women but themselves.
No one knows how many of these original Tasmanians existed when, in 1798, George Bass and Matthew Flinders first sailed through the Strait and discovered Tasmania to be an island. There were probably not more than a few thousand of them, and since they were nomadic hunters, they had no permanent settlements. The Tasmanians never built a village, let alone a town: generally the only traces they left were the middens found here and there along their hunting routes.
Nor does anyone know where they came from. Victorian anthropologists much enjoyed the “Tasmanian problem” and spent many happy evenings debating possible migratory routes and ethnic progenitors. Since the Tasmanians were unquestionably distinct from the mainland aborigines, it was assumed that they had originated in the north or central Pacific and had worked their way southward over the millenniums.
Modern theorists mostly suppose they came by way of Australia’s east coast, for they had no folk memories of long sea voyages and aborigines of apparently Tasmanian characteristics have been found in Queensland.
They were a smallish but long-legged people, rd-brown rather than black, with beetle brows, wide mouths, broad noses, and deep-set brown eyes. The men had rich beards and whiskers and wore their hair tightly curled in ringlets, smeared with red ochre; the women cut their hair short, but they were hirsute,too, and in old age often developed incipient mustaches. Physically, the Tasmanians seem to have lacked stamina: their senses were uncannily acute, but they were not very strong, nor very fast, nor even particularly agile, though they were adept at running on all fours. ( to be continued)…