ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Humans, water, and the colonization of Australia.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Stochastic models indicate rapid smallpox spread and mass mortality of Indigenous Australians after colonial exposure.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- A singular, broadly-applicable model for estimating on- and off-path walking travel rates using airborne lidar data.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Physiography, foraging mobility, and the first peopling of Sahul.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- Does Group Contact Shape Styles of Pictorial Representation? A Case Study of Australian Rock Art.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2022Article
- Re-evaluating model assumptions suggests that Australian birds are more tolerant of heat and aridity than predicted: a response to ConradieConservation physiology · 2022Article
- Landscape rules predict optimal superhighways for the first peopling of Sahul.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- Using satellite imagery to evaluate precontact Aboriginal foraging habitats in the Australian Western Desert.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Stochastic models support rapid peopling of Late Pleistocene Sahul.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Article
- Extinction of eastern Sahul megafauna coincides with sustained environmental deterioration.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Climate-human interaction associated with southeast Australian megafauna extinction patterns.Nature communications · 2019Article
- How long do floods throughout the millennium remain in the collective memory?Nature communications · 2019Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The Pleistocene global dispersal of modern humans required the transit of arid and semiarid regions where the distribution of potable water provided a primary constraint on dispersal pathways. Here, we provide a spatially explicit continental-scale assessment of the opportunities for Pleistocene human occupation of Australia, the driest inhabited continent on Earth. We establish the location and connectedness of persistent water in the landscape using the Australian Water Observations from Space dataset combined with the distribution of small permanent water bodies (springs, gnammas, native wells, waterholes, and rockholes). Results demonstrate a high degree of directed landscape connectivity during wet periods and a high density of permanent water points widely but unevenly distributed across the continental interior. A connected network representing the least-cost distance between water bodies and graded according to terrain cost shows that 84% of archaeological sites >30,000 y old are within 20 km of modern permanent water. We further show that multiple, well-watered routes into the semiarid and arid continental interior were available throughout the period of early human occupation. Depletion of high-ranked resources over time in these paleohydrological corridors potentially drove a wave of dispersal farther along well-watered routes to patches with higher foraging returns.
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