Well, I looked at almost all of what we used to call Stone Age cultures that were still functioning when we got there, but especially the Australian Aborigines , the Inuit, and the Athapaskans, because I was in an ice scenario, and I wanted to go north into the polarregions and see how people lived there.
So I'll set it up really quickly, which is before the Natasha story, before the Amerasian story, "Time Magazine" sent me to the Outback of Australia to do a cover story on Aborigines . And there was a woman I've been told to contact who was a social worker that worked with Aborigines to take me into the campus
And so I walked over and apologized, but I couldn't really calm her down, so I left. And I shot pictures of Aborigines all day with this woman who took me to the camps. And the woman working for me said, what are you doing for dinner tonight?
years ago. And this is the first time were saying objects moving long distances. How do we know that moving long distances is trade and not migration? Well, because in relatively modern Stone Age people like Australian Aborigines he could see the same phenomenon. There was a quarry called Mount Isa in northern Australia where the Kalkadoon tribe dug up stone axes. And they traded them with their neighbors for things like stingray barbs. And as a result of the stone axes ended up all over Australia in a far larger area than the Kalkadoon tribe
And in real life, most people don't change. And why did she want to spend time with the Aborigines ?
ever went to. And what happens when you cut a human off from trade and exchange networks? Well, one of the fascinating natural experiments … in this is what happened to Tasmanian Aborigines . They occupied Tasmania 35,000 years ago when it was firs--when it was a peninsula of the Australian continent. About 10,000 years ago the sea levels rose at the end of the ice age in Tasmania was cut off
burning, so I was wondering if you had any suggestions there. And you find tales throughout all -- basically every indigenous culture on the planet -- the aborigines , the Hopi Indians, the Navahos, the Seris.
to do a cover story on Aborigines . And there was a woman I've been told to contact who was a social worker that worked with Aborigines to take me into the campus to get permission. And so I checked into my hotel, and the woman who I had hired-- I hadn't met her yet,
I said, I'm going to go back and work on captions. And she said, well, a group of us that work with Aborigines are having dinner at a friend's house. Would you like to come and meet some other people involved in the aboriginal community and movement?
And then all North American tribes-- like, I would just get anthologies of Native American poetry and proverbs. But I would say, really, the Athapaskans, the Inuit, and the Aborigines were probably the three main. And so you understand that I'm doing all this by analogy backwards, and I'm saying that these are cultures that were basically studied in the 19th century, and it isn't clear
And she said, well, a group of us that work with Aborigines are having dinner at a friend's house. Would you like to come and meet some other people involved in the aboriginal community and movement? So I went to this house on the outside of town, and it was falling down and the walls were crumbling.