Reddit reviews The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People
We found 3 Reddit comments about The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
This is a subject I'm extremely interested in. I've actually been thinking about starting a subreddit with a focus on creating realistic, earth-like ecosystems—inventing individual animals and plants and their evolutionary histories, but maybe also trying to collect generalized rules to help with this aspect of worldbuilding.
I've been reading a book about Australian ecology, called The Future Eaters, and there seem to be some interesting patterns that allow for different kinds of animals to exist. Some things I've gleaned from the first few chapters:
Not a new idea. This was a central pillar of Tim Flannery's 1994 book The Future Eaters, and the 1998 doco series of the same name series he wrote and featured in. It generated a bit of debate then, though his conclusions (while similar) were based on different evidence.
I actually have, as part of a school trip to study the ecosystem. I really wish I still had that book, so I could give better examples than just an overview, but essentially the author's argument was that life on Australia evolved to deal with its rather resource poor ecosystem. So while you do still have predators, you don't see the large mammals that evolved on the more resource rich continents like Asia and Africa. The largest predators are the crocodiles, which have much lower energy requirements being cold-blooded lizards (plus they can hunt in the water), and after that you have dingoes, which are much smaller than the wolves and tigers of Eurasia on top of being not native to Australia (there is no archaeological record of them before humans arrived on the continent). Most other native fauna and flora have adapted low energy means to survive. The kangaroo's hop, for instance, is much more energy efficient than walking on four legs like most marsupials/mammals. And when you look at the environment as a whole, there is this rather strange symbiosis to it (the author compares it to the evolutionary arms race that defines the species of Eurasia/Africa, who are not as constrained by resources).
The reason why I brought all of this up is in answer to OPs question: the Aborigines never adopted a sedentary, agricultural lifestyle because they were limited by their poor environment. They instead adapted to their environment by living a lower energy hunter gatherer lifestyle. Incidentally, as part of my trip we spent a weekend with an aboriginal elder. He taught us basic things about their culture (including how to properly throw a boomerang :D) and I remember thinking about how in tune with nature these people really seemed. They had to be, or else they would exhaust the environment and die.
Anyways, the book is The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery (Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0802139434). If you are into evolutionary biology or just wonder why Australia has so many unique species, check it out.