The recent discovery, recounted here at Ars Technica, that the interior of Australia was inhabited by human beings as long as 50,000 years ago:
By analyzing layers of earth in the shelter, the scientists were able to construct a timeline of settlement in the space. They used carbon dating on nuggets of hearth charcoal and eggshells to discover that the shelter was first occupied about 50,000 years ago. They also used a dating technique called optically simulated luminescence (OSL) on buried grains of quartz. This technique determines when those quartz grains last saw sunlight and heat. Both techniques returned similar dates, adding to the researchers’ confidence in their findings.
This makes Warratyi the oldest evidence of human occupation in the arid Australian interior, long believed too hostile for ancient people who had few tools. But these findings make it clear that the ancestors of Australia’s indigenous people were, in fact, seasoned explorers who could survive in difficult conditions.
should remind us that the modern “Age of Exploration” which took place from about 1400 to some time in the last century was actually a period of rediscovery and that by the time Europeans got around to looking for them human beings had been living everywhere but the most remote and inhospitable places in the world from the highest mountains to the densest swamps or the most barren deserts. That includes Antarctica the “Antarctic convergence”, the environs of Antactica, where there have been permanent or semi-permanent residents for the last 250 years.
Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Captain Cook all expected to find people everywhere they went. What astonished them was when they found places that weren’t already inhabited.
Update
I have corrected the above to replace “Antactica” with “Antarctic convergence”.
Some of the accounts of exploration in Australia’s interior make for excellent dark humor. People bringing pianos and whatnot and ending up a skeleton in the dirt. God knows what the Aborigines thought of it.
I am not aware of any evidence of human occupation in Antarctica, and a Google search brings nothing relevant on the first page: can you point to a source?
Perhaps I misspoke. There has been habitation within the “Antarctic convergence” (the environs of Antarctica) for that long, cf. Headland, Robert K. (1984). The Island of South Georgia.
I have corrected the body of the post accordingly.