Peopling the last new worlds: The first colonisation of Sahul and the Americas

摘要

When people set foot in Sahul (Australia and New Guinea) about 50 thousand years ago, they entered a new world which had not seen any species of hominin before. More than 30 thousand years later, people moved into the cold regions of eastern Siberia, across the dry Bering Strait and into North America. In colonizing the north and the Americas they were similarly entering previously unvisited new worlds. The two continents were both colonized only by people who were modern in their biology and their behavior, but the outcomes of those colonizations were rather different.