Culture anthropolgy on Aborigines of australia Essay

Culture anthropolgy on Aborigines of australia - Essay Example The first Aboriginals are believed to have arrived in this unique and isolated piece of land some 50,000 years ago, when they migrated from the South Pole as the sea levels generally fell and the last Ice Age saw its end. Experts believe that the race then traveled on canoes and rafts across the ocean in search of a peaceful land (Barnard, 1996). The activities of aboriginals of the area remained secret and restricted to its own lands, until outsiders from around the world intruded their territories for political, economical, and anthropological purposes. Before the invasion of the British into Australia, (first invasion 1788), about 200 years ago, there were about 300,000 inhabitants living in the area, which constituted of 500 tribes using 200 distinct languages amongst each other, of which most of them are found extinct now; with each dialect defining each tribe that occupied a definite area in the continent. Whereas, lands owned by no tribal form were left arid and unoccupied, under the title of ‘no man’s land.’ (Bartlett, 2002). Though the Aboriginals vary abundantly from their appearance due to the diversity seen between their groups; however, some of the common features that all of them share are their dark brown skin with wavy hair, developed onto slender bodies which are erect showing their hardworking capabilities. Anthropologists believe that variations in their appearances are due to their migrations at different points of time in history. Whereas some critics to this opinion believe in ‘homogeneity’ of the aboriginals, whereas any variations in them might be due to variation in diet and the environment they lived in, while as a whole, they lived in isolation from rest of the world (Ashley, 2009). This paper discusses the isolation of the Aborigines of Australia form the rest of the world; as when development and technology were taking the world up by storm, they remained a loaf of this