Sahul Shelf

As Sahul or Meganesia the contiguous land mass is referred to the northern island of New Guinea was the Aru Islands, large parts of the Arafura Sea and the southern island of Tasmania during the last ice age from Australia. The present isolation of the islands from mainland Australia occurred at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels rose by more than a hundred meters due to the melting land ice of the polar regions. In contrast, Sunda and Sahul were never connected by a land bridge.

The resulting newly formed Straits between the Australian state of Queensland belonging to Cape York Peninsula and New Guinea is called Torres Strait and 140 kilometers wide. The Bass Strait between the island of Tasmania and the Australian continent is about 250 km wide and has an average water depth of about 90 m. The flooding of the Torres Strait occurred about 8,000 years ago and the Bass Strait before about 12,000 years ago. The sea level rose to its present level until about 6,000 years.

This separation of Sunda and Sahul is also reflected in today's diverse fauna of both regions whose boundaries each other the Wallace and Lydekker line are the Weber described. In contrast, the fauna is very similar to the now isolated islands within the former Sahul region. So marsupials come to New Guinea, Tasmania, Australia, and some western islands before to after Sulawesi and some types of rainbow fish both in northern Australia and New Guinea in the south.

Colonization

The earliest settlement phase Sahuls is recognized 50000-60000 years BC. A route can not be reconstructed because the available datings in New Guinea and Australia are almost all significantly older than the Southeast Asian. There is currently widely accepted that Sahul was colonized by 35,000 BC. People had reached the highlands of New Guinea, nearly 50,000 years ago, and more than 40,000 years ago, the temperate forests in the southwest of the continent. Some 5,000 years later, traces of settlements found in the dry and hot center as well as in rock shelters in the mountains of Tasmania. The different habitats were captured with a stone technology, which shows no standardized forms throughout the Pleistocene.