I'm currently ~60% on diffusion of bullroarers. This confidence is already being pulled down by the possibility that modern experts have relevant insights I still lack, but pulled up (a bit less) by the cultural biases that mean if modern experts were going to be wrong about something this is a good candidate. If tomorrow I learn this question is becoming topical in academia again this confidence level could shoot up fast.
60% is really high! If it diffused, then I think something like EToC or the snake cult is very likely.
>This confidence is already being pulled down by the possibility that modern experts have relevant insights I still lack
How convincing do you find the quotes where they basically say "we stopped studying this because it implies diffusion"?
Based on this comment I tried to find any recent paper on the bullroarer that mentions diffusion. There are a lot of papers on the bullroarer in South Africa or Australia in the last 10,000 years. Nothing about diffusion.
The most interesting paper discussed two possible bullroarers dated between 35-42 kya. They are separated by thousands of years and found in different caves in the same region in Germany. In the past they have been interpreted as bullroarers, this paper argues that they were a tool of some sort: that the holes in the ivory were used to make ropes. Could be! But also could be a bullroarer. Amazingly, this is found in the same cave as the earliest Venus statue (40-42kya), and is often pointed to as the start of Behavioral Modernity.
>If tomorrow I learn this question is becoming topical in academia again this confidence level could shoot up fast.
I think it's unlikely, not just because diffusion is not popular. Grand narratives in general are, and particularly about human origins. From a book published this month. The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins
"If we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started."
I guess my model for anthropology is a field that could shut down a talk about why male/female are still analytically important categories for their discipline. Facts are cudgels for political positions to many anthropologists. Sounds a bit cranky but don't know what else to think
I would love to get into contact to an expert on the bullroarer. Have had some email exchanges which were fruitful, but cold calling is mostly getting ignored :)
Adding my 2c on the likelihood of bullroarers diffusing (which I think match what you've written elsewhere):
Bullroarers being independently reinvented in multiple times and places seems very plausible to me - they're a simple and interesting trick that someone is going to stumble across sooner or later. Being given some special cultural/ritual significance also seems likely just because they're neat.
Being independently reinvented in multiple places *that all then apply the same ritual significance to them* seems less plausible - and that lack-of-plausibility scales with the number of supposedly-independent repetitions. If these are all independent, where's the culture that decided to make this neat new toy part of their wedding ritual instead of the men's cult?
Given the number of places that used bullroarers with similar cultural trappings, I'd put 'this correlation is not just coincidence' at easily 60% - at which point the question is 'if the shared causal factor is not diffusion, what is it?' Do humans just have a women-shall-not-hear-the-bullroarer gene?
Honestly, if I'm calculating this in isolation I'd put not-coincidence somewhere over 90% - the uncertainty for me is over whether we're looking at enough features of societies that a statistical fluke should be expected and ignored (i.e. green jellybeans a la xkcd.com/882).
Sure! I don't have a blog or substack to link, but would be honorary to be mentioned under this handle if you think I said something interesting enough.
The last point about correcting for multiple comparisons is really interesting. I would say, there really was just one comparison. In the first version of EToC I lay out the case that it was male initiation ceremonies that spread. I then looked for the best evidence of cultural diffusion, and it was male initiation ceremonies (and the Seven Sisters).
>Judging from cultural artifacts—myths, megaliths and the analog “I”—our genesis was not so long ago, perhaps as recent as the end of the Ice Age. Women first tasted self-knowledge. Seeing it was desirable, they initiated men with mind-rending rites of passage. Man henceforth lived separated from nature and from god. This consciousness meme, like wildfire, spread to the whole of humanity; a Great Awakening recorded in creation myths worldwide.
I didn't specify these would be age-grade ceremonies (that initiate a boy into being a man), so maybe this allows enough "wiggle room" for some multiple comparisons. But not much; it's a much narrower universe than the cultural world at large.
Yeah, I wasn't trying to suggest that you had actually gone out and done multiple comparisons personally. Just noting that if 20 people completely independently do 20 studies, you'd also expect one p=0.05 false-positive among those - and that archeologists have studied way more than 20 types of historical artifact...
>60% is really high! If it diffused, then I think something like EToC or the snake cult is very likely.
Diffusion strikes me as a very fundamental process and the only argument to be had as about its reach through spacetime. In reality, I'm conflating the estimate for bullroarers diffusing with the estimate for long-reach diffusion in general, because this seems a good example of it. Probably I should decrease that somewhat, but intuitively (I'm not spending the time to even start thinking about doing this properly in a mathematical sense) it doesn't sound like the adjustment would be big.
Anyway, the simplicity of the "diffusion can have long reach" model emboldens me to go that high. My probabilities for EToC or snake cult are currently not negligible, but not nearly as high (because there are several intermediate steps that need to be true, diluting confidence along the chain of reasoning, some boost from small number of alternatives notwithstanding).
>How convincing do you find the quotes where they basically say "we stopped studying this because it implies diffusion"?
>The most interesting paper discussed two possible bullroarers dated between 35-42 kya. They are separated by thousands of years and found in different caves in the same region in Germany. In the past they have been interpreted as bullroarers, this paper argues that they were a tool of some sort: that the holes in the ivory were used to make ropes. Could be! But also could be a bullroarer. Amazingly, this is found in the same cave as the earliest Venus statue (40-42kya), and is often pointed to as the start of Behavioral Modernity.
Admittedly "objects identified as bullroarers may not be bullroarers" is a potential failure mode I didn't consider in my 60% estimate. But it does sound like there is a lot more discussion about origins than identification, so if that is true I'm not too worried. Would be an interesting development if that changed!
>I think it's unlikely, not just because diffusion is not popular. Grand narratives in general are, and particularly about human origins.
I use "tomorrow" in the rhetorical "geological" sense. Postmodernism isn't going anywhere soon, but neither will it last for ever!
>I would love to get into contact to an expert on the bullroarer. Have had some email exchanges which were fruitful, but cold calling is mostly getting ignored :)
>Diffusion strikes me as a very fundamental process and the only argument to be had as about its reach through spacetime.
I think that the Seven Sisters trope proves that it can extend. At least I've never seen anyone treat that as coincidence or non-existent (even when a pair of astrophysicists wrote about it).
As the question of how wide and deep diffusion can go is fundamental to the project, one thing I'd like to do is actually read all of the Seven Sisters stories. There is the possibility that the anthropologists doing the collecting were being generous grouping them all together.
>I use "tomorrow" in the rhetorical "geological" sense. Postmodernism isn't going anywhere soon, but neither will it last for ever!
This is a nice thought. Incidentally one that you can get past by reading from the past, where they had different ideological shortcomings. (Though also less data, unfortunately; carbon dating hadn't been invented)
Research: "The archaeology of orality: Dating Tasmanian Aboriginal oral traditions to the Late Pleistocene" Published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 159, 105819 (2023)
ABSTRACT: Aboriginal people have lived in Australia, continuously, for tens of thousands of years. Over that time, they developed complex knowledge systems that were committed to memory and passed to successive generations through oral tradition. The length of time oral traditions can be passed down while maintaining vitality is a topic of ongoing debate in the social sciences. In recent years, scientists have weighed into the debate by studying traditions that describe natural events, such as volcanic eruptions and meteorite impacts, which can be dated using scientific techniques.
We apply this approach to Tasmanian Aboriginal oral traditions that were recorded in the early nineteenth century, describing simultaneous events that occurred over 12,000 years ago that support arguments that the longevity of orality can exceed ten millennia.
Authored by Duane Hamacher, Patrick Nunn, Michelle Gantevoort, Rebe Taylor, Greg Lehman, Ka Hei Andrew Law, Mel Miles
Interesting and well written as per. Some minor nit-picking over this sentence: "Luwian is the proto-Indo-European language spoken by the Hittites that went extinct circa 600 BC."
Luwian is an *early* Indo-European language (not proto, Proto-IE specifically refers to the specific common ancestor language spoken ~3000 BC i.e. the Yamnaya language). However, there is debate over whether the Anatolian branch split off from the other Indo-European languages from a "pre-Indo-European" or from the proto-IE main branch. Some people use "Indo-Anatolian" instead if they think Anatolian broke off in that earlier phase. And finally, it was spoken by the Luwians, who were para-Hittites (and subjects of them, although later the relationship reversed). The Hittites spoke Hittite, another Anatolian language that is a related but definitely distinct branch.
also the image on the churinga stone, generally, we learned in school what little we did on Aboriginal imagery here in Australia, so my accuracy is low... that would show two people sitting across from each other at a fire with a spear or digging sticks laid flat at their knees ---as viewed from above, a common POV in Aboriginal Art, (which is why it looks so abstract to western eyes) .
so this image basically means 'god'??? (a concept which I would argue is an invention of the dynamic between settled city folk and nomad interlopers)
so "god" on that reading of people seated at a campfire/ritual fire/smoking ceremony... is actually a meeting or a meal, which is how the world is made... this "supports" me own arguments of course, and is not shamanic at all (shamanism is a eurasia-america thang -- some glacial interconnection) (the steppe is the prairie) (and coming to it civilised height in mesoamerica)
who knows, (I suspect some academics think it is an inter-glacial eurasian steppe area development)
also depends on a definition but if shamanism just means old dude who is 'well-travelled', then its the grandmother hypothesis on drugs, and this could come and go fashion wise,
In/on Australia generally law-men did not travel to 'other worlds', in the 'dreaming' the world is one world, this world, you're soaking in it. A fish in water. Well travelled would mean one old fella is respected enough to learn and even keep a songline or two as a travel guide book and/or travel writings. song = land. Reading this as shamanism is a bit bizarre (reading all drug use and associated ritual practices as == shamanism is also weird)(WEIRD even).
If "shamanism" is restricted to practices and rituals and drugs used to enter/travel to other worlds, intervene, and report back... that is a whole different context... heading off to aliens world is no stretch in that context... Shamans are often regarded as having other-worldly personalities (personally I think a lot were just narcissists and psychopaths with a theatrical air).
The 65kya date is for the earliest evidence of humans in Australia. Not earliest evidence of art or Behavioral Modernity (which some say is only in the last 7,000 years). Going from "people have been on the continent for 65,000 years" to "Australian culture is 65,000 years old" is what muddies the water of the debate. Activists want the leap, even if it's not very well supported.
Tasmania gets cut off from the mainland Australia/Sahul, when glacial periods end.
Aboriginal populations arrive in Tasmania 40K ago. A glaciation begins at 30K. The de-glaciation took about 5-6K years. Sea levels dropped 120 metres (and then bounced back) forming 240km (160miles) Bass Strait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_Strait
Aboriginal populations in Tasmania are cut off about 12 000 years ago. None lived on Bass Strait islands at the time of European expansion. During glaciation the 'Bassian plain' was a very dry desert.
At the time of British settlement (who were very bad first contact anthropologists) they had a full suite of a 'modern' hunter-gatherer toolkit, including the same dreaming social structures, minus a few items and methods that they lost along the way. They stopped eating scale fish about 4K ago, gathering by diving for shellfish by women never went away. (Like it perhaps appears bow & arrow tech had been discarded on mainland Australia ---but not New Guinea, the other bigger island of Sahul). More isolated islands tend towards a depauperate set.
The experience of the Tasmanian Aboriginals is a direct influence for H.G. Wells in writing of War of the Worlds.
"it is clear that belief in the spirits of the dead was more prevalent in Tasmania - which may indicate an older stratum of religion. "
They also had cave art. I would be interested if they worshipped the Rainbow Serpent, which is common on the mainland. If they don't worship the Rainbow Serpent, that would be evidence that it is a recent development.
I'm currently ~60% on diffusion of bullroarers. This confidence is already being pulled down by the possibility that modern experts have relevant insights I still lack, but pulled up (a bit less) by the cultural biases that mean if modern experts were going to be wrong about something this is a good candidate. If tomorrow I learn this question is becoming topical in academia again this confidence level could shoot up fast.
60% is really high! If it diffused, then I think something like EToC or the snake cult is very likely.
>This confidence is already being pulled down by the possibility that modern experts have relevant insights I still lack
How convincing do you find the quotes where they basically say "we stopped studying this because it implies diffusion"?
Based on this comment I tried to find any recent paper on the bullroarer that mentions diffusion. There are a lot of papers on the bullroarer in South Africa or Australia in the last 10,000 years. Nothing about diffusion.
The most interesting paper discussed two possible bullroarers dated between 35-42 kya. They are separated by thousands of years and found in different caves in the same region in Germany. In the past they have been interpreted as bullroarers, this paper argues that they were a tool of some sort: that the holes in the ivory were used to make ropes. Could be! But also could be a bullroarer. Amazingly, this is found in the same cave as the earliest Venus statue (40-42kya), and is often pointed to as the start of Behavioral Modernity.
So thanks for asking the question, this is by far the oldest maybe-bullroarer I know of. Linking paper for posterity: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.adh5217#core-R15
>If tomorrow I learn this question is becoming topical in academia again this confidence level could shoot up fast.
I think it's unlikely, not just because diffusion is not popular. Grand narratives in general are, and particularly about human origins. From a book published this month. The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins
"If we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started."
I guess my model for anthropology is a field that could shut down a talk about why male/female are still analytically important categories for their discipline. Facts are cudgels for political positions to many anthropologists. Sounds a bit cranky but don't know what else to think
I would love to get into contact to an expert on the bullroarer. Have had some email exchanges which were fruitful, but cold calling is mostly getting ignored :)
Edit, another good example of the biases: https://twitter.com/Paracelsus1092/status/1778064524429373547
Adding my 2c on the likelihood of bullroarers diffusing (which I think match what you've written elsewhere):
Bullroarers being independently reinvented in multiple times and places seems very plausible to me - they're a simple and interesting trick that someone is going to stumble across sooner or later. Being given some special cultural/ritual significance also seems likely just because they're neat.
Being independently reinvented in multiple places *that all then apply the same ritual significance to them* seems less plausible - and that lack-of-plausibility scales with the number of supposedly-independent repetitions. If these are all independent, where's the culture that decided to make this neat new toy part of their wedding ritual instead of the men's cult?
Given the number of places that used bullroarers with similar cultural trappings, I'd put 'this correlation is not just coincidence' at easily 60% - at which point the question is 'if the shared causal factor is not diffusion, what is it?' Do humans just have a women-shall-not-hear-the-bullroarer gene?
Honestly, if I'm calculating this in isolation I'd put not-coincidence somewhere over 90% - the uncertainty for me is over whether we're looking at enough features of societies that a statistical fluke should be expected and ignored (i.e. green jellybeans a la xkcd.com/882).
Also, can I quote those last two paragraphs and link to you in an upcoming Subscriber Post?
Sure! I don't have a blog or substack to link, but would be honorary to be mentioned under this handle if you think I said something interesting enough.
Thanks for adding! Great to know others agree.
The last point about correcting for multiple comparisons is really interesting. I would say, there really was just one comparison. In the first version of EToC I lay out the case that it was male initiation ceremonies that spread. I then looked for the best evidence of cultural diffusion, and it was male initiation ceremonies (and the Seven Sisters).
>Judging from cultural artifacts—myths, megaliths and the analog “I”—our genesis was not so long ago, perhaps as recent as the end of the Ice Age. Women first tasted self-knowledge. Seeing it was desirable, they initiated men with mind-rending rites of passage. Man henceforth lived separated from nature and from god. This consciousness meme, like wildfire, spread to the whole of humanity; a Great Awakening recorded in creation myths worldwide.
I didn't specify these would be age-grade ceremonies (that initiate a boy into being a man), so maybe this allows enough "wiggle room" for some multiple comparisons. But not much; it's a much narrower universe than the cultural world at large.
Yeah, I wasn't trying to suggest that you had actually gone out and done multiple comparisons personally. Just noting that if 20 people completely independently do 20 studies, you'd also expect one p=0.05 false-positive among those - and that archeologists have studied way more than 20 types of historical artifact...
>60% is really high! If it diffused, then I think something like EToC or the snake cult is very likely.
Diffusion strikes me as a very fundamental process and the only argument to be had as about its reach through spacetime. In reality, I'm conflating the estimate for bullroarers diffusing with the estimate for long-reach diffusion in general, because this seems a good example of it. Probably I should decrease that somewhat, but intuitively (I'm not spending the time to even start thinking about doing this properly in a mathematical sense) it doesn't sound like the adjustment would be big.
Anyway, the simplicity of the "diffusion can have long reach" model emboldens me to go that high. My probabilities for EToC or snake cult are currently not negligible, but not nearly as high (because there are several intermediate steps that need to be true, diluting confidence along the chain of reasoning, some boost from small number of alternatives notwithstanding).
>How convincing do you find the quotes where they basically say "we stopped studying this because it implies diffusion"?
I find them pretty convincing of the bias being there. Kind of reminds me of the story around Einstein's "biggest blunder" (see shameless self-promotion at https://aetherialporosity.wordpress.com/2020/07/05/things-i-learnt-writing-my-thesis-introduction-part-1-einsteins-not-so-big-blunder/).
>The most interesting paper discussed two possible bullroarers dated between 35-42 kya. They are separated by thousands of years and found in different caves in the same region in Germany. In the past they have been interpreted as bullroarers, this paper argues that they were a tool of some sort: that the holes in the ivory were used to make ropes. Could be! But also could be a bullroarer. Amazingly, this is found in the same cave as the earliest Venus statue (40-42kya), and is often pointed to as the start of Behavioral Modernity.
Admittedly "objects identified as bullroarers may not be bullroarers" is a potential failure mode I didn't consider in my 60% estimate. But it does sound like there is a lot more discussion about origins than identification, so if that is true I'm not too worried. Would be an interesting development if that changed!
>I think it's unlikely, not just because diffusion is not popular. Grand narratives in general are, and particularly about human origins.
I use "tomorrow" in the rhetorical "geological" sense. Postmodernism isn't going anywhere soon, but neither will it last for ever!
>I would love to get into contact to an expert on the bullroarer. Have had some email exchanges which were fruitful, but cold calling is mostly getting ignored :)
Agreed this would be great!
>Diffusion strikes me as a very fundamental process and the only argument to be had as about its reach through spacetime.
I think that the Seven Sisters trope proves that it can extend. At least I've never seen anyone treat that as coincidence or non-existent (even when a pair of astrophysicists wrote about it).
As the question of how wide and deep diffusion can go is fundamental to the project, one thing I'd like to do is actually read all of the Seven Sisters stories. There is the possibility that the anthropologists doing the collecting were being generous grouping them all together.
>I use "tomorrow" in the rhetorical "geological" sense. Postmodernism isn't going anywhere soon, but neither will it last for ever!
This is a nice thought. Incidentally one that you can get past by reading from the past, where they had different ideological shortcomings. (Though also less data, unfortunately; carbon dating hadn't been invented)
No it's true, I was there
Can't argue with that!
I took a picture of you there to prove it! But since then I lost my phone :-(
Research: "The archaeology of orality: Dating Tasmanian Aboriginal oral traditions to the Late Pleistocene" Published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 159, 105819 (2023)
ABSTRACT: Aboriginal people have lived in Australia, continuously, for tens of thousands of years. Over that time, they developed complex knowledge systems that were committed to memory and passed to successive generations through oral tradition. The length of time oral traditions can be passed down while maintaining vitality is a topic of ongoing debate in the social sciences. In recent years, scientists have weighed into the debate by studying traditions that describe natural events, such as volcanic eruptions and meteorite impacts, which can be dated using scientific techniques.
We apply this approach to Tasmanian Aboriginal oral traditions that were recorded in the early nineteenth century, describing simultaneous events that occurred over 12,000 years ago that support arguments that the longevity of orality can exceed ten millennia.
Authored by Duane Hamacher, Patrick Nunn, Michelle Gantevoort, Rebe Taylor, Greg Lehman, Ka Hei Andrew Law, Mel Miles
but via https://www.facebook.com/thra1951/posts/pfbid0xpfvuygGUQjvJjsS3fa3v12skyiWyd7J4heBhro8ir3zx5hMEEerFsQevnsrMHjxl
with nice map of Bass Strait
great find
Interesting and well written as per. Some minor nit-picking over this sentence: "Luwian is the proto-Indo-European language spoken by the Hittites that went extinct circa 600 BC."
Luwian is an *early* Indo-European language (not proto, Proto-IE specifically refers to the specific common ancestor language spoken ~3000 BC i.e. the Yamnaya language). However, there is debate over whether the Anatolian branch split off from the other Indo-European languages from a "pre-Indo-European" or from the proto-IE main branch. Some people use "Indo-Anatolian" instead if they think Anatolian broke off in that earlier phase. And finally, it was spoken by the Luwians, who were para-Hittites (and subjects of them, although later the relationship reversed). The Hittites spoke Hittite, another Anatolian language that is a related but definitely distinct branch.
Thanks for keeping me honest! updated
also the image on the churinga stone, generally, we learned in school what little we did on Aboriginal imagery here in Australia, so my accuracy is low... that would show two people sitting across from each other at a fire with a spear or digging sticks laid flat at their knees ---as viewed from above, a common POV in Aboriginal Art, (which is why it looks so abstract to western eyes) .
so this image basically means 'god'??? (a concept which I would argue is an invention of the dynamic between settled city folk and nomad interlopers)
so "god" on that reading of people seated at a campfire/ritual fire/smoking ceremony... is actually a meeting or a meal, which is how the world is made... this "supports" me own arguments of course, and is not shamanic at all (shamanism is a eurasia-america thang -- some glacial interconnection) (the steppe is the prairie) (and coming to it civilised height in mesoamerica)
me own argument at https://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
the basic failure is to not realize 'shamanism' as a thing post-dates the settlement of Sahul, its as bad as calling hunter-gathers nomads
Well, that is the contentious issue. Did anyone have shamanism 50,000 years ago?
who knows, (I suspect some academics think it is an inter-glacial eurasian steppe area development)
also depends on a definition but if shamanism just means old dude who is 'well-travelled', then its the grandmother hypothesis on drugs, and this could come and go fashion wise,
In/on Australia generally law-men did not travel to 'other worlds', in the 'dreaming' the world is one world, this world, you're soaking in it. A fish in water. Well travelled would mean one old fella is respected enough to learn and even keep a songline or two as a travel guide book and/or travel writings. song = land. Reading this as shamanism is a bit bizarre (reading all drug use and associated ritual practices as == shamanism is also weird)(WEIRD even).
If "shamanism" is restricted to practices and rituals and drugs used to enter/travel to other worlds, intervene, and report back... that is a whole different context... heading off to aliens world is no stretch in that context... Shamans are often regarded as having other-worldly personalities (personally I think a lot were just narcissists and psychopaths with a theatrical air).
Rather than getting mired in a definition about shamanism, fine to think narrowly about Australian initiation rituals discussed in this post
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/apr/17/australia-venice-biennale-family-tree-kith-and-kin-archie-moore?
The 65kya date is for the earliest evidence of humans in Australia. Not earliest evidence of art or Behavioral Modernity (which some say is only in the last 7,000 years). Going from "people have been on the continent for 65,000 years" to "Australian culture is 65,000 years old" is what muddies the water of the debate. Activists want the leap, even if it's not very well supported.
Tasmania gets cut off from the mainland Australia/Sahul, when glacial periods end.
Aboriginal populations arrive in Tasmania 40K ago. A glaciation begins at 30K. The de-glaciation took about 5-6K years. Sea levels dropped 120 metres (and then bounced back) forming 240km (160miles) Bass Strait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_Strait
Aboriginal populations in Tasmania are cut off about 12 000 years ago. None lived on Bass Strait islands at the time of European expansion. During glaciation the 'Bassian plain' was a very dry desert.
At the time of British settlement (who were very bad first contact anthropologists) they had a full suite of a 'modern' hunter-gatherer toolkit, including the same dreaming social structures, minus a few items and methods that they lost along the way. They stopped eating scale fish about 4K ago, gathering by diving for shellfish by women never went away. (Like it perhaps appears bow & arrow tech had been discarded on mainland Australia ---but not New Guinea, the other bigger island of Sahul). More isolated islands tend towards a depauperate set.
The experience of the Tasmanian Aboriginals is a direct influence for H.G. Wells in writing of War of the Worlds.
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/worldbuilding-101
PS An early representative of modern humans has been found at Lake Mungo (mainland Aus) from before 40K years ago.
https://ia.anu.edu.au/biography/mungo-man-27704
Tasmania is an interesting case, in part because they had so few technologies. Do you know much about their religion?
Google took me to this paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40453717 which says:
"it is clear that belief in the spirits of the dead was more prevalent in Tasmania - which may indicate an older stratum of religion. "
They also had cave art. I would be interested if they worshipped the Rainbow Serpent, which is common on the mainland. If they don't worship the Rainbow Serpent, that would be evidence that it is a recent development.