The climate of Australia

[curupira]

It looks like a large portion of Australia is just plain desert or semi-arid. I wonder what it is like to live in those desert or semi-arid areas.

Köppen classification:

[curupira]

An interesting study on humans, water and the colonization of Australia in pre-historical times:

Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth, but humans dispersed rapidly through much of the arid continental interior after their arrival more than 47,000 y ago. The distribution and connectedness of water across the continent, and particularly in its arid core, played a pivotal role in facilitating and focusing early human dispersal throughout the continent. We analyze the distribution and connectedness of modern permanent water across Australia. The modelled least-cost pathways between permanent water sources indicate that the observed rapid occupation of the continental interior was possible along multiple, well-watered routes and likely was driven by the depletion of high-ranked resources in each newly occupied area over time.

The location and connectivity of water in the landscape is critical to understanding early human dispersal through water-limited environments across the globe (27, 28). These considerations are particularly important for Pleistocene Australia, given the broad extent of semiarid and arid environments and the comparative rapidity with which these areas were colonized. The clear relationship between archaeological sites from >30 ka and modern permanent water provides strong evidence that, at the continental scale, these factors have always been important. A striking feature of the spatial analysis presented here is the clear linkage of well-watered routes from northern Australia, through the eastern semiarid and arid zone, to southeastern Australia and into the rocky arid center of the continent. Given that permanent water points act as a focus for potential prey and other resources, the apparently rapid dispersal through much of interior Australia likely was similarly focused along these well-connected routes defined by permanent water points, and dispersal potentially was driven farther along these routes by the progressive depletion of local resources. A corollary of this analysis is that some apparently well-watered, interconnected regions lie along potential dispersal routes but have yet to yield evidence of early (or, in some places, any) occupation in prehistory. These regions include the Channel Country of southwest Queensland and the route identified in this study that runs south through the Northern Territory into the arid center (Fig. 4). The lack of evidence of early occupation could result from poor preservation potential, from limited archaeological survey effort, or from the identified route indeed not being used. These alternatives, in turn, suggest that the dataset, in combination with other terrain attributes, can be used predictively to identify areas worthy of investigation for their potential to yield previously unrecognized archaeological sites to delimit the initial dispersal routes better.

The approach presented here represents a progression from abstract ideas regarding the filling of the continent to testable hypotheses grounded in spatially explicit data (Figs. 2 and 4). The analysis suggests that permanent water, connected during periodic inundation events, provided—and provides—effective conduits for human movement over thousands of kilometers through much, but not all, of the continental interior. The WOfS dataset only currently covers the Australian continent. However, it is based on satellite imagery with global coverage. The imagery can be used to derive similar products elsewhere, in turn enabling progression beyond the identification of drainage networks and basins as potential dispersal routes (29, 30, 60) to a more nuanced interpretation that considers the permanency of water across a landscape. The same approach therefore can be used to develop and test models that seek to explain the rapid dispersal of modern humans out of Africa (27⇓⇓–30, 61) via similar periodically interconnected hydro-ecological networks (1, 27, 28, 43, 62).

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/20...608470113.full

[curupira]

An interesting population density map of Australia (not surprisingly, the arid and semi-arid areas were generally avoided for settlement):