"The ancestors of Scandinavians appear to have moved out of the Mediterranean just 2000 years ago"

I suspect you meant 20,000 yearts ago, Bob, as my recollection of the archaeology is that changes to the northern ice sheets allowed people to colonise particular parts of the landscape quite early. But your general point is dead right.

Australian archaeology is a most interesting engagement of the (supposed) cultural neutrality and 'values-free' perspective of the scientific method with the cultural baggage and 'values-laden' perspectives (emphatically plural) of a post-colonial society. And that's just among the really well informed specialists; it's open slather everywhere else.

When I was a postgrad botany-ecology student there was an announcement of the discovery that skeletal remains from Kow Swamp (Victoria) had been dated at 10,000 years bp. On the basis of their classification as "robust" or "gracile" (thick boned vs thin boned, in summary) the crania "appeared" (ie, were interpreted) to come from two distinct populations. The first inferences getting around the university staff rooms (the details of the remains were not formally published for more than twenty years, a really slack lack of activity on the part of the physical anthropologist "responsible") was that a population of Homo erectus was coexistent with one of Homo sapiens.

The implications of such an interpretation were astounding and wide ranging. As a bushfire/succession ecologist there was the possibility that H. erectus had been in Oz for yonks (there was recent evidence of human occupation in Oz for about 20k years, at that time) and that H. sapiens had recently arrived and brought fire technology; 10k years was calculated as long enough to cause the genetic lability of eucalypts and acacias that were then being investigated. Great stuff! But without the archaeology published properly, nobody could formally publish anything about such possibilities. Which didn't stop the great Welsh story teller of Oz archaeology publishing (with no supporting data) his extremely influential opus on firestick farming.

For a generation of students, the fact that the Kow Swamp remains exhibited more variation than the current (and extremely multicultural) Oz population has led to essay topics on whether there was one founding population or successive migrations into Oz before the Balandas arrived. If there was only one founding population then the current Indigenous community could hold the moral and political high ground on all sorts of issues including, but certainly not limited to, management of landscapes and biodiversity. If there had been more than one migration phase, the current Indigenous community could be regarded as no different from the white fellas; they just arrived earlier than the white fellas. Even among the experts, any scientific investigation into this, otherwise quite 'ordinary', topic runs foul of such political implications. And Oz archaeology is replete with other examples.

You can imagine what the sophisticates of the Daily Telegraph and their Hansonite hangers-on would do with the complexities of any such discussion. And, until recently, nobody bothered asking the Indigenous community for their engagement with the debate. For far too long, Aborigines were there to be studied as objects (much like the pre-1967 Referendum fauna) and, while Oz archaeologists are (generally) reconstructed in such matters, the recent battles the Tasmanians had with the British Museum would suggest that old habits die hard.

There's a way to go yet! End of today's rave.

Cheers, Rowan