Buried tools and pigments tell a history of humans in Australia for 65,000 years

Because there's not enough evidence to make that claim. The structure of indigenous societies were nomadic hunter gatherers who were (as far as the evidence tells us) subsistence hunters. Truth is Indigenous Australians didn't have the population (or population density), nor the culture to hunt these creatures to extinction. Being largely nomadic within set ranges (i.e they travelled often but within their own nations land) it was suicidal to overhunt and deplete the resources, and this becomes a stronger point when you consider the timeframes on which the Aborigines existed on their land (again 20,000 years of overlap here). Also consider the sheer number of creatures that went extinct here, everything from Marsupial Lions to gigantic emus and echidnas, it doesn't match up with indigenous australians hunting behaviours that somehow they decided to overkill for this short period of time all these larger creatures, and then that behaviour suddenly stopped? (we have no evidence of Indigenous Australian's overhunting any other creatures to extinction).

To go even further, there's nothing in their oral history or paintings which gives the slightest hint that overhunting or hunting for status was ever present in any Indigenous Australian culture. Considering the ice age ended around the same time as the death of the last megafauna in Australia, I think its fair to evaluate every conclusion you make about the death of the megafauna within that context.

I'm not saying Indigenous Australians didn't have an effect on the death of the megafauna, anything being hunted in a time like a massive climate shift is going to affect population, but there's no direct evidence, nor indirect evidence about the behaviour and cultures of Indigenous Australia which point to mankind being the driver behind the numerous extinctions.

It's part of the "noble savage" myth, as you say. Very much to do with a narrative about indigenous peoples living in harmony with their environment unlike us stupid modern people who are destroying it.

This is linked with indigenous rights, native title, and a whole bunch of really deep-rooted issues in Australian culture. Aborigines living in the bush are revered, those living in the cities are despised. Australia takes pride in the fact that we have the longest continuous culture on the planet, whilst simultaneously doing everything possible to destroy that same culture. It's very complicated and very political.

Unless the science says definitively that humans were the cause for the extinctions, then the default position is that they weren't.

north america and asia are big, but it seems very possible that (with other factors) humans helped push mammoths to extinction.

you are also assuming equal dispersion across Australia, which may not be the case, especially if climate change was cutting back their habitats - like it was with the mammoth.

> This doesn't seem convincing to me, Indigenous Australian populations maxed out around 1 million people, across the entire island. Considering the population density and ranges of these creatures, I don't see how they could physically do so.

Do we know of any comparable, but better understood / researched cultures, where population numbers plateauing were not directly correlated with local extinction events -- but did occur some time after the plateauing? Of course it's confounded by trying to estimate numbers from tens of millenia ago, climate and volcanic events, and so on, but I feel there must be some other peoples / regions on the planet that can we can compare to.

As to the last point, initiating regular large fires is one way for a small number of people to effect significant landscape change.

> All Indigenous Australians were nomadic hunter gatherers, with a deep seated animalistic dreamtime belief system, it doesn't make sense that a new culture suddenly rose up and caused mass extinctions ...

Keep in mind that there were around 250 different languages, reflecting the long-term isolation of many of these groups, and presumably at least that many different variations of 'the culture'. I think it's careless to assume a single, shared, and fully understood, culture existed across the entire continent for thousands of years, tens of thousands of years ago.

And I don't think anyone's suggesting that a 'new culture rose up and decided to eat all the giant wombats'.

> Not really, again 20,000 years and Australia is a big, big place.

True, but consider that today at least, about 5% of the landmass is considered arable, which IIRC puts us on a par with, say, France in terms of absolute arable land.

While grazing animals obviously don't require arable land per se, it helps to contextualise the landscape here -- there's immense areas of the country that are inhospitable to humans and large animals.

Almost all the useful (in terms of finding things to eat and drink) land is around the coast. Migrations of humans and megafauna doubtless occurred in response to local events, climate changes, curiosity, etc - but there are obvious constraints by and to both groups' movements due to this coastal limitation.

Then it should definitely be captured in the story. As a potential conflict of interest.

Both as an Australian and as a linguist it's painful to understand how quickly indigenous culture here is being lost; my narrow and focused view is on language but the rate at which Aboriginal languages are dying at is absolutely alarming.

Protecting culturally significant sites here is of vital importance both for historical reasons as well as to the lives of modern indigenous Australians.

And if the only reasonable claim on a piece of dirt is sovereignty, not to mention that that sovereignty been placed back in the hands of aboriginal elders, the sovereignty alone isn't enough justification to go digging for the past - it would seem that curiosity is part and parcel of a respect for culture.

No one has proven there's no 9th planet for instance. No one's proven drug X doesn't help with disease Y.

Multiple things have pointed to way less than 65,000 years (As per link)

Of course conformity with theory is also a problem, we think it's 50,000 years so we make our study on X (aka DNA) conform with this.

But both articles are HN worthy and one is wrong. So if you're not skeptical then there's a problem with your world view.

This has become a problem in recent decades and has led to certain systemic problems that have been discussed in various places in recent months.

If you say something like "I am submitting this grant request to replicate the experiments of X who have published results Y so that we can confirm X's results" then your grant application will most likely be refused.