The Aborigines were the first human inhabitants of the continent of Australia. No one knows for sure how they arrived in Australia, but many believe that they walked over to the new land from Asia about 60,000 years ago. The Aborigines were nomadic hunter-gatherers like most of the Earth's inhabitants during that time. The Aborigines lived in small groups of about three dozen people and were constantly on the move from one place to another. These small groups would stay in one particular area until they had used up that area?s food supply and then they would move to a new area that had food to support them. Because the Aborigines lived in the Australian deserts, they were constantly on the move because of the scarcity of food.
Hunting was the task of the adult males in the Aborigine packs. Each day the adult males would leave the rest of the group and go out and hunt for meat. The Aborigines used wooden spears and boomerangs to hunt their prey. The wooden spears had a very sharp hard end theat would pierce an animals flesh and bring them down in their tracks. Sometimes arrow heads made of flint or bone were attached to the ends of the spears. These arrow heads were made by taking a piece of bone or flint and chipping it with a very had rock. The main target of the male hunters were small animals. They were quite common, easy to catch and kill, and they provided quite a good amount of meat for the group. Sometimes the hunters got extremely lucky and were able to kill a large animal. This was a reason for celebration because a single large animal provided that Aborgine group with enough meat to supply everyone in the group for quite a while. But killing large animals came quite rarely fo the hunters. Another common target for the men were birds. Birds provided the hunters with some meat, but since there were a lot of birds in the areas where they hunted, a lot of meat could be gotten out of the birds. The Aborigine men also fished. All different types of fish were extremely plentiful in Australian rivers and in the ocean off of the Australian coast.