re: #180 ggt

Sea level was lower, though it didn’t bottom out until the peak of the last glaciation 20 some thousand years ago.

So the populating of Australia would still have had to been by boat, though the journey would have been shorter than today. However, much of Indonesia could have been walked, or the water crossings were so short a simple raft (tree trunk) would have sufficed.

The continents don’t move far enough over 70,000 years to make a big difference.

Convergence in culture (e.g., architecture) has more to do with human physiology and language requirements. All humans have the same binocular vision and hearing response (more or less) so we make things that look similar. All humans are tribal animals so we build our living places to accommodate the tribe. Etc.

Language similarities can be used to trace origins, but that falls apart the farther back one goes.

Only anatomy (skeletons primarily) and genotype can be used to any confidence to understand origins and evolutionary changes. Cultural remains are useful but too far back and the details sort of vanish. We know our ancestors were using tools of a certain type a million years ago, but we don’t know much else about what they did.