Our interdisciplinary study tests pivotal hypotheses concerning insularity, isolation and cultural change in Aboriginal Australia. It examines two now-divergent island populations residing in similar physical environments and with shared ancestral language and a common mainland source group. The project examines how these groups contended with cultural change over a 10,000-year time scale, sometimes acculturating exogenous traits whilst at others exploiting insularity and isolation to promote distinctiveness through local invention in such a way that two different cultures emerged.
