Prehistoric stress in Australian Aborigines : a palaeopathological survey of a hunter-gatherer population

Abstract

This palaeopathological study records the stress related disease patterns of the precontact Australian Aboriginal continental population. In the absence of any previous work of this sort in Australia, it is the beginning of a new avenue of investigation into Australia’s prehistory. Almost all Pleistocene and Recent Aboriginal skeletal remains held in museum collections around Australia were examined and all regions of the continent are represented Using both skeletal stress markers (cribra orbitalia, Harris lines and dental hypoplasia) and other pathologies (non-specific infection, osteoarthritis and trauma) an assessment was made of the stresses acting upon Aboriginal hunter-gatherers. The diversity of the results obtained showed a substantial increase in general pathology through time, especially those reflecting persistent or chronic stress. A surprising variation in these factors defined southeastern Australia as the area where most stress occurred. Aboriginal remains from the central Murray and coastal New South Wales show that stress was greater and more constant in these areas than anywhere else. This reached a peak among the central Murray populations, whose subsistence strategy, as reflected in patterns of osteoarthritis, involved substantial biomechanical stress also. Southern Victorian groups, however, suffered more seasonal or acute stress than any other but there was less evidence of chronic stress. The difference in patterns of palaeopathology among Aboriginal coastal groups shows a quite unexpected heterogeneity among people living similar lifestyles. Aboriginal people living in the west, north and centre of the continent were relatively stress free. It is suggested that the main reasons for this variation between these areas and the southeast were differences in population size and degrees of sedentism. The densest Aboriginal populations were in the southeast and some of these were sedentary. It has been suggested that the temporal and spatial differential in stress observed here was a factor of the changes to Aboriginal demography and subsistence strategy in the late Holocene.

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