Quote:
Originally Posted by Uncle Robin
It's disappointing to hear Attenborough regurgitating this "noble savage" BS. There is clear paleontological evidence of a MASSIVE spike in extinctions contemporary with the arrival of the first humans in Australia. The same thing happened thousands of years later next door in New Zealand, where humans wiped out the moa and species that depended on it within 2-3 centuries of arriving.
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One of the hazards of providing quotes is that the lack of context means some readers may misinterpret. The two books in question
Adventures of a Young Naturalist and
Journeys to the Other Side of the World are republications of accounts of expeditions from late 1950s and early 1960s. This historical perspective is one of the aspects that made these books very interesting to me. There is quite a lot in them that would not meet with modern standards for this sort of thing (starting with the title of "Zoo Quest" when first published), nor with more modern thoughts fed by research since that time. Also, that particular quote comes just after describing a journey into the desert with some of these aboriginals, so it was literally true of the time he was writing, albeit without reference what may have happened 50000 years previously. There were other interactions described, with observations as to how the lives of the aboriginals were being affected by the mere presence of white settlers. For all that his accounts might not meet with the mores over half a century later, it seemed to me that there was an inherent respect in Attenborough's accounts that was uncommon at the time he wrote them. (This is still in the time of the
Stolen Generations.)