The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire by Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus

displayed innovations that they lacked. And Meggitt discovered an equally revealing fact: although we know that the Walbiri began using subsections no more than 150 years ago, they had revised their origin myth to allege that subsections were given to them during the fourth stage of Creation.
    The lessons of Australia are many. Yes, the nineteenth-century Aborigines provide insights into a long-ago era, but neither they nor anyone else were frozen in time. From the moment they reached Australia, the Aborigines began creating new ways to organize society, some of which were still spreading when Europeans arrived. The Aborigines also show us that, contrary to popular belief, cosmology and religion are not eternal and unchanging. When societies and their situations change, cosmologies get revised as well.
    As we have seen, many of Australia’s innovations failed to reach Tasmania. Rising sea levels at the end of the Ice Age isolated that island, preventing some ancient behaviors from being superseded. The Tasmanians hunted with javelins and wooden clubs but missed out on the spear-thrower and the boomerang. They initiated youths by scarring them or knocking out a tooth, but evidently they had never learned about circumcision. They had cremations and simple interments but no tree-platform burial. Like the Andaman Islanders, some Tasmanians wore around their necks the bones of deceased relatives. They were comfortable going naked but liked to wear long necklaces of perforated seashells like those of our Ice Age ancestors.
    The Australian Aborigines are among the most extensively studied of all hunters and gatherers. Tragically, the same cannot be said for the Tasmanians. The first European colony on the island was established in 1803, and by 1877 virtually every Tasmanian Aborigine had died of disease, neglect, or outright mistreatment. We must piece together the story of the Tasmanians from the accounts of travelers and European colonists. In these accounts the Tasmanians often sound like an amalgam of Olympic athletes and Navy Seals.
    Take, for example, the economic partnership of husband and wife. Armed with an 18-foot wooden javelin, which they could reportedly throw 40 yards, Tasmanian men got within range by stalking kangaroos on their hands and knees. At other times, they set fire to the brush and speared the animals as they emerged. They threw kangaroos onto live embers to singe off the fur, and then they cut them into portions that they dipped into ashes “as if into salt.” Using a wooden throwing stick called a waddy (a precursor of the boomerang), the men also killed birds, which were then placed on embers to singe off their feathers.
    Tasmanian women, for their part, are said to have caught opossums by shinnying rapidly up gum trees, cutting toeholds, and using a loop of rope “like a telephone lineman.” Considered excellent swimmers, they dived for abalone, prying them from the rocks with wooden chisels. They loved the eggs of black swans, penguins, petrels, and ducks. One Tasmanian woman is alleged to have put Cool Hand Luke to shame by eating, at a single meal, 50 to 60 large eggs of the sooty petrel. Such meals might be washed down with local cider, fermented from the sap of the eucalyptus tree.
    Since most Tasmanians vanished before there were anthropologists to interview them, we have only sketchy details of their social organization. We do know, however, that some tribes fought bitterly. Warriors approached their enemies with their hands clasped innocently atop their head, secretly dragging a spear through the brush by gripping it with their toes. To accept the “gift” of a flaming firebrand was to accept a challenge to combat, something unwary colonists learned to their sorrow.
    During the 1890s many residents of Australia, appalled by the demise of the Tasmanians, pressured the government to create a post called Protector of the Aborigines, so that similar genocide would not take place in Australia.