Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
rather than tubers that form a staple part of the diet, and they know that
controlled fi re at regular intervals encourages a diversity of seed-bearing
plants to thrive.
This long cultural tradition of controlled burning may now be gaining
new life, ironically through the impact of the modern world. In 2007, to
expedite the permitting process for a huge new refi nery in nearby Darwin,
ConocoPhillips agreed to pay a million Australian dollars to the Arnhem
Land tribal councils. The money was earmarked to encourage traditional
burning patterns. The idea is to bring under control the immense wildfi res
(most of them deliberately set) that currently burn of half of Arnhem Land
every year, allowing the refi nery company to of set its own carbon emissions.
We can only hope that this encouragement of traditional practices will help
to restore the damaged ecosystem of Arnhem Land and bring back some of
the vanished animals and birds.
How do my experiences in this fragile northern Australian world bear on
the Great Migration? Do these present-day collisions between tradition and
the modern world really have any bearing on how the migration took place
and why it was so rapid?
The humans who fi rst migrated out of Africa and along the southern
rim of Asia were confronted with utterly new situations, unlike anything
their ancestors had encountered during previous stages in their migration.
They found extensive coastal mangrove forests along the shores of south-
ern India and Southeast Asia that would have been impossible to traverse
except by boat. And they encountered, one after another, the vast estu-
aries of the great Asian rivers—the Indus, the Ganges-Brahmaputra, the
Irrawaddy, and the Mekong. Each river was dif erent, each fl owed through
dif erent country, and the swamps of their estuaries harbored a dif er-
ent mix of food plants, animals, and diseases that modern humans were
encountering for the fi rst time. When the migrants crossed Wallace's Line
they encountered an even more dramatic change in the animals and plants.
All these new environments posed a continuous series of life-or-death
challenges.
My guess is that, just as with the burning of Arnhem Land, similar care-
less overexploitation of new ecosystems also took place in the distant past
