Why clear the land and plant a "crop" when you get enough from the plants that all the other animals rely on? Why would you try growing something that doesn't want to grow there? Particularly "crops" that ultimately end up destroying the native life of islands. See palm/rubber/coffee/tea plantations.
>why…when you get enough..
That’s the problem, you don’t always get enough, and when you don’t people die. Usually the children and old folks first. Creating your own food supply reduces that risk.
>ultimately end up destroying…
You think they could anticipate those future outcomes hundreds of years ago? Wow.
These numbers are not unique to Australia, it's considered to be commonplace in hunter-gatherer societies.
Crops destroying native life is immediate, not years in the future. It’s not like there was nothing before on that acre you cleared for planting.
>Why clear the land and plant a "crop" when you get enough from the plants that all the other animals rely on?
So that you don't have to walk many miles a day foraging and kill all but one of your babies at a time, cause you can't carry any more. Basically, same reason as anyone else who went from hunting/gathering to farming.
Also Aborigines had no trouble burning forests to make grounds more attractive to animals they hunted, eventually converting varied biomes to eucalyptus forests, so the purported do-no-harm attitude is proven bullshit.
Nice logic.
What is "a lot" that indicates the majority of tribes didn't understand that babies happen when sex happens? Have you ever heard folk stories or native stories about birth and death?
If you're on an island, having an uncapped population is a recipe for disaster. This much is on obvious. The goal of living isn't to create as many more humans as possible.
It's like you're offended that humans would follow the same natural path as animals where access to resources is finite. Or at least that it is "bad" or "evil" that humans could ever live in a situation where they can't just consume more andore resources
Aboriginal stories largely say that it's Rainbow Serpent that brings in babies. This more or less matches the pattern of constant hunger that made women infertile outside of a small window around the rain season. It's understood that the rest of the world figured out the link from observing domestic animals, something absent in Australia of the time.
There are multiple papers trying to tackle this non-understanding, including ridiculous propositions that they all kinda know, but "repress" the knowledge.
>If you're on an island, having an uncapped population is a recipe for disaster.
Having to kill your own children is disaster.
>Or at least that it is "bad" or "evil" that humans could ever live in a situation where they can't just consume more andore resources
Yes, it's very much desirable that nobody is hungry, sick, or murdered. Yes, learning to get more resources from what you have is also very much desirable. And yes, it's bad and evil if instead people kill babies and murder each other over food like animals.
Before you ask, yes there are plenty of Aboriginal Dreamtime stories depicting someone stealing food and getting killed.
And there's no counterpart to the Genesis myth that would say that X shagged B and they had a child.
How much to breed is a separate question, but equilibrium with the environment doesn't have to be at the point of paleolithic misery.
A global society which works collaboratively to maintain both our modern technosphere _and_ a livable, habitable biosphere. Progress doesn't have to come with all of its current negative externalities -- most of them are driven by short-term profit driven thinking that doesn't take our collective biosphere into account.
Some tribes figured out that some tuberous plants can be replanted and will regrow after the tuber has been harvested and that's it.
Some may have understood how seeds work (that's debated) but at no point did Aborigines clear a plot of land to plant a particular species with seeds harvested last season.
This was a reason of total misunderstanding with the arriving Europeans, there was no way to lure them to help farm and get their share of the crops, it just wasn't on their map.
In contrast, Maoris just across the ditch understood both growing plants and raising livestock, and a mere decade after wheat and pork were brought from Europe they were widely growing both.