What 4 things make a nation?
A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a combination of shared features such as
language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or territory. A nation is thus the collective identity of a group of people understood as defined by those features.
Id say that makes the continent full of countries a nation and nations well before White man. In fact as the oldest living culture on earth its a very special one. But History also suites as does ethnicity, the island continent is also a territory.
Australian Aboriginal culture is the oldest SURVIVING culture on the planet.
This means that it has existed as a CONTINUOUS culture longer than any other LIVING culture.
There have been older cultures - certainly, various African cultures amongst them but they have not survived as continuous cultures to the current day because whether through war, catastrophe, famine, disease, annexation or absorption they were displaced by newer ones.
Indigenous Australians, however, were almost entirely isolated.
They migrated from what is the modern-day Indonesian archipelago between fourty two and seventy thousand years ago depending upon the source hypothesis.
The most broadly accepted theory places their arrival on the Australian mainland around 60 thousand years ago and the lower figure in that range is supported by carbon dated human remains (see: Mongo Woman).
“Civilization” is defined by the development of agriculture and an artisan class.
This means that the abundance of food caused by the advent of agriculture (and the subsequent long term storage of grain) freed many people up to specialize in other areas because they no longer needed to dedicate all their time to hunting and gathering - the upshot being that we got craftsmen, builders, artists, academics ect.
Civilization first appeared between 3000 and 4500 years ago, again depending upon the source hypothesis.
Though it’s a misnomer to view all indigenous cultures as identical (just as you would not view all African or North American tribal cultures as identical) this broadly places ALL of the VARIOUS aboriginal cultures upwards of at least 37.5 thousand years, and most likely approximately 57 thousand years, older than “civilization”.
(All set against the framework of a continent that was already ancient before the Himalayas were thrust up through the earth's mantle.)
And then the British invaded.
http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/2ballyn.pdf
Even by the European-centric standards of 18th and 19th century international law, Indigenous people here passed the test for having sovereignty.
theconversation.com
