The shortest distance from Papua, New Guinea to the northern tip of Australia is less than 90 miles.
Geologists claim that they were originally all contiguous land but, over time, rising ocean levels separated them.
What sort of COMMON species would we expect to encounter in BOTH places, given how close together they are?
In particular, what sort of similarities or differences between humans in both places should we expect?
Why are the ethnic / genetic differences between Papuans and Australian aboriginal people be so pronounced?
After all, small boats or canoes should have been able to make the trip easily.
=============================================================Lineages may diversify when they encounter available ecological niches. Adaptive divergence by ecological opportunity often appears to follow the invasion of a new environment with open ecological space. This evolutionary process is hypothesized to explain the explosive diversification of numerous Australian vertebrate groups following the collision of the Eurasian and Australian plates 25 Mya. One of these groups is the pythons, which demonstrate their greatest phenotypic and ecological diversity in Australo-Papua (Australia and New Guinea). Here, using an updated and near complete time-calibrated phylogenomic hypothesis of the group, we show that following invasion of this region, pythons experienced a sudden burst of speciation rates coupled with multiple instances of accelerated phenotypic evolution in head and body shape and body size. These results are consistent with adaptive radiation theory with an initial rapid niche-filling phase and later slow-down approaching niche saturation. We discuss these findings in the context of other Australo-Papuan adaptive radiations and the importance of incorporating adaptive diversification systems that are not extraordinarily species-rich but ecomorphologically diverse to understand how biodiversity is generated.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... an_pythons
Europe (and especially the Roman Empire) is the perfect example of native species hunted to extinction, such as elephants, lions and monkeys.
This may explain many of the differences between extant species of flora and fauna in Papua versus mainland Australia.
But does it explain the differences between human genetic groups in both places?