Hi T800,

If you are correct, Mungo Man died not thirty-odd thousand years ago, but more than sixty thousand years ago.

And that males can inherit mitochondrial DNA: I thought only women could, and therefore pass it on to their daughters. Or do you mean the Y chromosome ?

'Out of Africa' being unproven ? Hardly. There must be many, many DNA sequences having been done by now, easily linking all human beings ultimately to African ancestors, and the one you report seems to be one of the only ones - okay, the only one - which cannot be linked to the imperceptibly-slow migration out of Africa.

But you have set yourself a problem: how might the presence of a non-Out-of-Africa human, or of a hominin, in Australia be explained ? How did he mate and with whom ? Were there many like him (of course, there had to be at some time) ? Where did he come from, if not Africa ? East Asia, i.e. he was a Denisovan ? But ultimately, they too came 'out of Africa', just a bit earlier. What other humans does his DNA relate to ? Or are you claiming, none at all ? That he wasn't human ?

If you are claiming that he was an example of a separate species from the later stocky Aboriginal people in southern Australia, you may be mixing up times: sixty thousand years ago, Australia was entering a long, warm period (I think?) but ten thousand years ago, (I'm presuming this is who you meant) the Kow Swamp people had been living on the edge of a glaciated area in western Victoria, and had very likely adapted their body shapes over the twenty thousand years since the last warm period, from gracile to robust, i.e. evolving from tall and slender to shorter and stocky.

Joe

Hi Foxy,

Reading is crucial, but it is what and who you read that is important. Henry Reynolds is what is known as a 'Google historian'; his knowledge is very limited, and his views are narrow, based mainly on his own feelings and on a 21st Century take of right and wrong. He never compares Australia with other counties of the times. He is ignorant of early documents; has never read the 'classics' of history. The rot in history set in during the 1960s, and Reynolds is a product of that time as are his contemporaries, who all churn out the same stuff without question. I urge you to read Windscuttle, who will introduce you to people like Bill Stenner, who spent much of his life living with Aborigines.

Josephus,

Kath Walker was a communist; she would have no interest in the Bible.

Foxy,

Just reading through some posts again, I notice that your 'evidence' seems to come mainly from ABC sources. You will never get more than the one side from them - the ABC is a sheltered workshop for the Left. You are too smart to be locked into one side of things. Again: Windschuttle, Windschuttle, Windschuttle. If you can get hold of his 'fabrication' series, that would be be a good start.

Hi Foxy,

I'm not sure that the writing of history is some sort of beauty contest, where us spectators simply select the one we like best and ignore the rest. To me, that sounds like 'factology', or 'post-truth'. A bit like Chauncey Gardener trying to change the channel of reality when he was assaulted. No, reality is, it doesn't change to suit our feelings.

I don't know that Henry Reynolds has done much primary research, rather than re-cycled what others have written, which in turn was often recycled from earlier writers. So much of your 'appeal to authority' may fall on barren ground.

Back in the late nineties, when I typed up the 600-page Journal (1859-1879), of the Rev. George Taplin, founder of Pt McLeay, I sent a copy (in those days, an actual floppy, sent by mail) to Henry Reynolds, sort of half-expecting some detailed response, but got just a 'thank you' instead, which was nice. I hope he read it. I found it to be a gold-mine, probably of course because my wife came from there and there was a great deal in it about many of her ancestors. It's all on my web-site: www.firstsources.info, Taplin and Pt McLeay page.

Of course, even primary written sources tell one story. Actual evidence out on the ground would provide another source. But conversely, if something didn't happen at all, there wouldn't be any evidence. History doesn't strike some 'balance' between what happened and what didn't, it's unbalanced very much in favour of 'what DID happen' and properly ignores what didn't - apart, of course, from some historians focussing on WHY something didn't happen, which can be as important as why something DID happen.

[TBC]

[continued]

The combination of masses of written evidence AND no counter-evidence on the ground can be pretty conclusive: to me, the facts of

* a single employee of the Aborigines Department in SA,

* of a network of fifty ration depots,

* the issuing of boats and guns for free,

* free medical attendance,

* no reliable reports of massacres, driving people off their land or herding people onto missions,

* the fact that the law protecting Aboriginal people's rights to use the land as they always had done, even now

- all this paints a fairly conclusive picture. I measure any historian's efforts against that picture, and find some of them wanting.

I just wish some courageous and competent - and ideally impartial, if possible - person or group would actually carry out fair dinkum research into, say, a particular massacre on a particular claimed massacre site. In Queensland , there would be thousands, according to Reynolds. Okay: find one. Or preferably a few, let's say all in one area. And extrapolate from there. I'm craving proof, evidence, forensic findings, anything that might show conclusively that whites massacred Aboriginal people anywhere.

Love,

Joe