FactBoy and the Chasm of a Thousand Fools

For It Is Fact.

Silence ye doubters!

Fie ye unfaithful rabble!


From the deepest depths of the darkest of deep dark places flies into your face like a Pheonix from the Flames your One True Provider (OTP) of factual and actually quite interesting information.

Oh! You don't like it 'in yer face' do you?

FactBoy knows no other way.

If you want him, and you know where to find him, maybe you can tell him yourself.

Until then though -

Rub your hands together in glee, force under control that twitching facial tic contorting the corner of your maniacal grin and sit on the edge of your orthopedic chair...


FACT:


- The Aboriginal people travelled the open sea to colonise Australia some 50,000 years ago.

- They did this thousands of years before anyone else is known to have dared even dip a shin in the briny wash let alone construct a raft and head out of sight of land to see what they may find.

- At the time, the last Ice Age had frozen vast quantities of water in the polar ice caps, with sea levels 120 metres lower than they are today.

- This meant Europe (including Britain), Asia, Africa and even America (linked to
Asia by a land bridge across the Bering Strait) formed a single, vast
supercontinent, across which early humans could and did (thank you very much)
migrate.

- But: Australia, uninhabited and linked to New Guinea, was out on its own – there
was at leats 60 kilometres (40 miles) of clear, blue, empty open sea between it
and the nearest part of Indonesia (then linked to Asia).

- From this distance, given Northern Australia’s flat terrain, it would have been
impossible for any part of the continent to be visible over the horizon.

- Aboriginals are known, however to have crossed it: the earliest firmly dated
evidence of human occupation in Australia are some 50,000 year old stone tools
unearthed in an Arnhem Land rock shelter in the far north of the Northern
Territory.

- The details of this voyage will never be known – the type of boat or raft used
remains banked in the vaults of time. The dank tropical coastline on which they
most likely landed no longer exists – reclaimed by the sea at the end of the last
Ice Age 10,000 years ago.

- The story of why the Aboriginal people set off to sea, how they found the
continent of Australia, and why, having done this, they forgot, and never made
another like it, will excite the imagination of all who exalt the poetry of
journeying and the magic of an epic tale

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