Possibly, two more junk science studies trying to malign Western colonialism?
One of the two studies seems to have relied heavily on computer modelling! This is not evidence!
The abstract of both studies are loaded with dubious ideological language indicating a bias on the part of researchers.
Why did the indigenous people of Australia not protect themselves? Did these people not know anything about contagious diseases?
What if the smallpox did not only arrive from the northern coast by other seafaring populations?
"On a hot summer day in January 1788, 11 ships filled with British convicts and sailors landed in Australia’s Sydney Harbor. There, naval Captain Arthur Phillip raised the Union Jack and claimed the continent for the British crown.
The arrival of this so-called First Fleet preceded a catastrophe that befell the continent’s Indigenous people. More than a year after the first landing, “there are a significant number of Aboriginal people perishing in horrible, ghastly circumstances [???] from what sounds like smallpox,” says Lynette Russell, a historian at Monash University. “By 1789, a horrendous depopulation has occurred.” ...
Some historians put forward an alternative hypothesis: that the disease entered the continent from the north through contact with seafaring populations in Indonesia, where smallpox had been circulating for centuries. ...
The team used computer models to test both hypotheses, incorporating mortality rates, potential travel pathways based on the availability of water, data on Aboriginal language groups, and estimates of population densities between Sydney and Australia’s northern coast. The modeling showed that any smallpox epidemic originating on Australia’s northern coast would have petered out before making it thousands of kilometers over land to Sydney Harbor.
“No matter how bad we assume the disease to be, it couldn’t have made it from the north to Sydney at the right time,” says Flinders University ecologist Corey Bradshaw, a co-author of both papers. “It’s beyond a shadow of a doubt” that it came with the fleet. ...
The study sidesteps the question of whether members of the First Fleet knowingly exposed Indigenous people to smallpox. Although there’s no record of any such plans from Australia, British colonists are known to have deliberately infected Indigenous groups in North America, where smallpox also took a catastrophic toll. ...
In the other preprint, members of the same research team calculated how large of a population was exposed to those impacts. Based on ethnographic reports gathered in the late 1800s, previous researchers had suggested there were between 200,000 and 800,000 people in precolonial Australia, mostly living in tiny, isolated bands of hunter-gatherers. “There’s been an assumption that Aboriginal populations were quite low and their activities were ephemeral and transient,” says archaeologist Alan Williams, a consultant who co-authored both papers.
Analyzing thousands of radiocarbon dates from archaeological sites across Australia, Williams tracked when people first reached different parts of the continent, beginning more than 50,000 years ago. He then extrapolated population growth over time, based on fertility and survival rates in other parts of the world and the rate at which artifacts proliferated across the landscape as a proxy for population growth. “If you start with a population of 1000, and it goes up even 1% a year, you end up with a population of millions,” Williams says. ..."
From the abstract (2):
"The impact of smallpox (variola) on Aboriginal communities in Australia beginning in 1789 was catastrophic and continues to cause intergenerational trauma. [???]
Historically biased perspectives [???] and contemporary misinformation of the disease’s introduction and spread impede modern-day truth-telling [???] and efforts towards reconciliation and national healing.
Understanding whether the disease entered and spread from pre-colonial Makassan (Indonesian) trade along the northern coast, or from the British First Fleet’s arrival in southeastern Australia in 1788, is necessary to estimate the demographic impact.
Here we developed stochastic, multipatch epidemiological models supported by systematic evaluation of historical observations to test hypotheses regarding possible disease entry points, spread rate and demographic impacts.
Our models support the hypothesis that entry of the disease was in southeastern Australia. Even under ideal conditions and with higher-than-probable infection rates, simulations show that smallpox was unlikely to reach Sydney from a northern entry.
We found no evidence that the 1789 epidemic was Australia-wide. Assuming 60% lethality based on global data, the loss of approximately 220,000 people would have occurred in these regions. While catastrophic to traditional Indigenous lifeways in the southeast, the disease also provided the catalyst for population decline and marginalization of Indigenous people in the face of expanding European populations. Our models indicate that it is unlikely that other parts of Australia were affected by the initial epidemic. We warn readers that the content of this study might be distressing."
From the abstract (4):
"Estimating the size of Indigenous populations in Australia prior to European colonial invasion [???] is essential to truth-telling [???] and reconciliation.
Robust estimates of the population dynamics of pre-colonial Indigenous Australians are poor due to lethal diseases, frontier violence, and no systematic censuses.
We review ethnographic observations, archaeological and genetic reconstructions, and modelled carrying capacity, to infer Indigenous population size prior to colonial invasion. This allows an estimate of the number of excess deaths in post-colonial times.
Congruency of the modelled (not historical accounts) estimates suggests a bootstrapped pre-colonial median of 2.51 million, or 0.33 people km -2 . For a median pre-colonial population of 2.51 million, ~ 32,500 excess deaths year -1 (2.39 million deaths in total) would have had to occur over the late 18 th and early 19 th Centuries from colonial invasion-related mortality.
These findings highlight the major impacts of invasion experienced by Indigenous Australians, and demonstrate their survival, resilience, and recovery over the past 235 years."
British ‘First Fleet’ brought smallpox to Australia—and may have killed millions | Science | AAAS "Two papers pin the deadly disease’s introduction on British colonists and suggest the continent held far more people than previously believed"
Fig. 1 The 49 ethnographic entries from the Binford29 hunter-gatherer database (red dots — darker red indicates relatively higher densities) overlaid on the HadCM330 net primary production-derived estimates of human carrying capacities (expressed in people km-2). States and territories indicated. Legend indicates relative densities (greyscale). Also shown are several place names mentioned in the text.
