Both half right: Updating the evidence for dating first human arrivals in Sahul (original) (raw)

This paper updates our previous analyses of the evidence for the timing of human arrival in Sahul. It reviews advances in dating technologies, summarises new data for sites published a decade ago or earlier, and examines the evidence from sites published since 2004. Extensions in time for first arrival can be attributed to improvements in both luminescence and radiocarbon dating techniques and especially the refinement of 14C calibration. The similarity of the ages of the earliest dates and their consistency with data from eastern Asia and Wallacea suggests that the discipline has now defined an event horizon that places first colonisation near but somewhere short of 50,000 years ago.