They could not have arisen independently because Australia has no apelike creatures from which humans could have descended. Says Bryson: "The first occupants of Australia could not have walked there because at no point in human times has Australia not been an island. Archaeological finds from the last decades of the 20th century show that humans arrived on the continent between 45,000 and 60,000 years ago. Perhaps most mysterious is how Australia, the largest island in the world, became populated with humans. Without natural predators and doing what rabbits do, the rabbits ate everything in their path.
You'll at the least learn some astounding things about Australia, among them that the world's 10 most poisonous snakes are all in Australia that its population density is the lowest in the world, at six people per square mile and that millions of acres in the states of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia were completely denuded of plant life after a landowner named Thomas Austin imported 24 wild rabbits from England in 1859 and released them into the bush as shooting targets. If you're planning a trip Down Under, it's mandatory reading, and if you, like me, find Bryson's way with words highly entertaining, read it anyway. Of late I have been listening to Bill Bryson's "In a Sunburned Country," which although published 15 years ago offers Bryson's usual entertaining mix of history and travelogue. So last month I enjoyed listening to "Lost and Found," a debut novel by Brooke Davis, and a later review will cover "Big Little Lies" by Liane Moriarty, another Aussie writer. I'm on a bit of an Australiana kick these days, in part because my younger daughter is an American ex-pat living in Melbourne.
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