![]() Incidentally, Torres' crew captured six boys and six girls from Mailu, near Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, and three Torres Strait girls from one of the Central Islands, and took them to Manila, supposedly to be baptised. Torres Strait is named after a Spanish captain, Torres, who sailed through Torres Strait in 1606 on his way to Manila in the Philippines.Īlthough he wrote a letter to the King of Spain describing his voyage, it seems this was kept a secret from mapmakers until 1762 when the archives at Manila were opened to others. This means likely places to find older archaeological remains are on the hills of the larger islands of western Torres Strait and on the volcanic islands of eastern Torres Strait. ![]() ![]() In fact the only limit is that if the ancestors of modern Islanders made camps near the shoreline at a time of lower sea level, anything they left there would have been submerged when the sea level rose to where it is today. There is no reason to think that much earlier evidence could not be found in the future. In the last 25 years, archaeologists working in the Torres Strait have found evidence of human settlement dating back 2,500 years. How long have people been living in the Torres Strait? This probably means that pigs, whose origins lie in Eurasia, had not yet reached Papua New Guinea by the time the land bridge had submerged by the rising sea 8000 years ago. On the other hand, domestic pigs, which are today common in Papua New Guinea, did not cross into Australia. The land bridge accounts for the fact that today some animal and bird species live in both Papua New Guinea and North Queensland: the Spotted Cuscus and Southern Cassowary, for example. The rocky coast of Cape York would not have looked much different from what it does today, but the Papua New Guinea coast in the northern Torres Strait would have been a few kilometres further inland, as much of the present coast has recently formed from sediments laid down by river deltas. Since much of the Torres Strait was covered by only 20 metres of water, people at that time could easily walk between Cape York and southern New Guinea. More than 8,000 years ago world sea levels were about 100 metres lower than today. Pearlshelling comes to the Torres Strait.How long have people been living in the Torres Strait?.New Guinea and Australia joined by land.History of the Torres Strait up to full annexation in 1879
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |