Taken sometime in the 1860s, these are the last four ‘full blooded’ Tasmanian Aboriginals. Truganini, the last to survive, is seated at far right.
When the first European explorers set foot in Tasmania, the large island-State off the south-east coast of mainland Australia, the local Tasmanian Aboriginal people seemed to have only a few ultra-basic ‘Stone Age’ type implements.
The way anthropologists commonly tell the story (as reflected in a major Discover magazine article1) they appeared to know nothing about simple devices which just about all other tribes had—such as friction tools to light fires, bone needles to sew clothes, and the like.
Despite the cold climate of this massive island, they would go around naked apart from being smeared with animal fat.
Having no way of starting a fire, they had to carry burning firebrands with them (from previous campfires or lightning strikes). Their shelters were mostly crude windbreaks of bark and branches, and their stone axes (unlike those of mainland Aborigines) had no handles.
Nor did they seem to have any of the spear-throwers, boomerangs, or fish-catching technology common on the mainland. Even though many lived on the coast, the idea of eating fish seems to have been regarded by them as odd.
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