FROM THE PAST TO THE FUTURE
Building Our Collective Brain
Approximately 12,000 years ago, the melting of the polar ice caps flooded the Bass Strait which connected Tasmania to the Australian mainland. As a result, Tasmania, which was previously an Australian peninsular, found itself isolated from the rest of Australia. When European explorers first made contact with Tasmanians in the late 1700s, they found that the local population had the most basic toolkit of any society ever encountered by Europeans. Interestingly, the explorers found that Tasmania lacked technologies such as the boomerang, fire-making, the spear-thrower, polished stone tools, and bone tools found on mainland Australia.