How did the Aborigines get to Australia?

One question that comes up alot when discussing Noahs Flood is how did the kangaroos/wallabies get to Australia. When humans evolved in Africa 200,000 years ago, the Aboriginals got to Australia by boat and foot. If the Aboriginal people can get to Australia why is it unbelievable to believe that kangaroos/wallabies can get there?Edited by Portillo, : No reason given.Edited by Portillo, : No reason given.

Thread copied here from the How did the Aborigines get to Australia? thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

Are you seriously suggesting that kangaroos can build boats ???

Because wallabies are useless at building boats?Seriously, there are hundreds of species of marsupial in Australasia, along with an extensive fossil record. There are no marsupials in the Middle East. Disagree? Please show me the fossil evidence for Asian wallabies. Even suggesting that marsupials came from Asia in a big boat is simply childish and silly.Have you heard of the Wallace Line? It's a notional line drawn through Indonesia. On the Asian side of the line we see Asian wildlife. On the Australian side of the line, with very few exceptions (crab-eating macaques and some species of bat), we see Australasian wildlife. This is a fantastic example of what's called biogeography; the study of the distribution of living things. Biogeography provides some of the very best evidence for the ToE and the differences between Australian and Asian organisms is a good example.It's not just a question of Noah dropping off a few kangaroos, it's more a question of entire ecosystems evolving in concert, over hundreds of thousands of years. It's a question of the Australian fossil record, which goes completely against your rather naive Bible stories.Mutate and Survive

Um, haven't you answered your own question here? Only humans can build boats.

While the boat comment is misguided, it does turn out that kangaroos are really good swimmers. Perhaps an argument might be made that kangaroos could have island hopped their way onto an island that is merely a really arduous swimming distance away from Australia.Portillio seems to be addressing the question of how kangaroos got to the ark, and then returned to Australia after the great flood was over. I'm not sure I find his answer satisfactory, or why he bothers. Surely God could have overcome whatever difficulties faced the kangaroos.But as has already been pointed out, the question people ask about kangaroos is a considerably different from the question as phrased by Portillio. We know that man migrated to Australia, but we also see that man is present in every single location between Egypt and Australia. On the other hand, there don't seem to be any kangaroos in the Middle East, while there is evidence of kangaroos evolving in Australia.

Hi Portillo, From Message 386 on the That boat don't float thread:

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Yes, the pertinent question is how did all the species get to the places where they are found today, many with no known intermediates between their location and a single place where the ark was purported to land.

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How did koalas get to Australia without any koalas left in between?
How did they survive the journey without eucalyptus trees along the way and no evidence of them anywhere but Australia?

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And the question is not just one of getting from A to B, but also why that specific B for each species and no other - why no koalas in North America? Why no koalas in England?

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Why do we end up with the distribution pattern seen today?

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The question is more complex than just kangaroos/wallabies, but how did the whole Australian ecosystem get to Australia without leaving any evidence along the path?Same for South America and North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.Look at the Koala, it is a poor swimmer and it only eats eucalyptus leaves, and you only find (historical) evidence of koalas and eucalyptus trees in Australia.Science answer: they evolved there.Creationist answer: ? (careful - I've heard some doozies)Enjoy.

This thread is a great example of the Creationists mind set and ability to even frame a question worthy of serious investigation.First, let's take a look at what the evidence shows.There is more than ample fossil evidence that kangaroos and wallabies and even wallaroos were in Australia not just long before man arrived but rather millions of years before man arrived.There is zero evidence of any kangaroos, wallabies or even wallaroos in the Middle East at anytime before zoos.So the proper Biblical Flood related question is "How did Noah get the 'roos he needed to load onto the Ark to replenish those that got wiped out in the Biblical Flood?"Did Noah build a boat and go get them?Did the 'roos hop on water to come to the Middle East?Maybe the God in the Biblical Flood Myths parted the Indian Ocean so that two pair (or seven pair) of 'roos could hop over to Thailand and up through Burma and India and Pakistan and Iran and Iraq?

I was assuming Portillo meant that when humans repopulated Australia they would have brought their favorite marsupials with them. But I guess he could instead be thinking that they reached Australia the same way islands can become populated by immigrant species that arrive via floating vegetation.--Percy

Compared with the more usual critters, the Kangaroo is a quite remarkable animal.It is implausible that there could have been a Kangaroo in the middle East at the time of Noah, but that no mention was made of such a remarkable animal. Yet there is no mention of it in the Bible.Having grown up in Australia, I can tell you that it is pretty much impossible for an Australian to believe that Noah's flood extended to Australia. For that matter, it is pretty much impossible for an Australian to believe that the Australian aborigines are descendents of Adam.Ken Ham is the exception that proves this rule On a related note, I recently saw this in the blog of Peter Enns:

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Nearly twenty years ago, my oldest was six years old. One of our bedtime routines was a brief Bible reading.

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One evening we found ourselves in the Garden of Eden storyAdam and Eve, a piece of fruit, and a snake with vocal chords.

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As I read, my son kept sighing, as if impatient with my reading. Being the only Old Testament expert in the room, I ignored him and kept going.

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But he kept sighing. He even had the audacity to interrupt me.

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Daddy, snakes can’t talk.

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The woman said to the serpent, we may eat fruit from the tr.

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Daddy. Snakes. Can’t. Talk.

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http://www.patheos.com/...r-on-the-raising-of-young-hereticsA six year old child, even though raised in an evangelical family, can tell that the Adam and Eve story is a fable, a "Just So" story. Apparenty, you have to be grown up to be stupid enough to believe that the Adam and Eve story and the Noah's Ark story are actual descriptions of historical events.

Well, some problems:(1) There is evidence of marsupials in Australia before humans.(2) How did they manage that without leaving one single marsupial behind in Eurasia?(3) Why did they have this big fetish for marsupials, and bring along all the kangaroos and wallabies and potoroos and wombats and bandicoots and Tasmanian devils and koalas and marsupial moles and ten different kinds of betong, rather than spoil their record by bringing along something useful like a sheep? What was going through their heads ... "No, sheep won't work in Australia, let's have another thing with a pouch." And let's not forget all the extinct mammals, like Diprotodon, a wombaty thing the size of a rhinoceros which they apparently thought would be useful for some reason.(4) It is extremely unlikely that their "favorite marsupials" would have included the Tasmanian devil, an animal which Wikipedia describes as noted for its "pungent odor, extremely loud and disturbing screech [...] and ferocity"; and downright unthinkable that anyone would want to share a boat or a continent with a nine-foot tall carnivorous kangaroo (now mercifully extinct).(5) And that's just the mammals, let's not forget the snakes and the spiders. Apparently they thought no continent would be complete without the addition of the most venomous species on earth.(6) I can't find a shred of evidence that the Australian aborigines ever had any form of transport larger than a dugout canoe. This would present them with severe difficulties in transporting all this stuff. One would again have to ask --- why all the marsupials? We can at least imagine the first settlers being perversely selective in this way, but how could one attribute it to mere chance? And, again, one would have to ask how come no marsupials were left behind. Somehow this floating vegetation managed to separate out all the marsupials from the placental mammals, which would be an act of exceptional acumen for driftwood, which is not usually noted for its intelligence.

Could you expand on this proposition a bit? Is there some reason to believe that aborigines do not have a common origin with the rest of us?

I read that as him saying something about the Australians rather than the aborigines....

It's not often that a post on EvC reduces me to rolling helplessly on the floor, tears streaming down my face, all the while hee-ing and hawing like a donkey. Dr A, your post is magnificent!

No, none at all. It's just that the aborigines have been around for a long time and predate the middle east civilizations. So the common ancestry would have to be from earlier than Adam.