https://biblacad.ro/2023/12/05/carti-postale/

Prior to contact with the British in 1803, the Tasmanians lived as hunter-gatherers in isolation, unaware even of the existence of the Australian mainland.

When the British first came into contact with them, they were shocked by the primitive nature of Tasmanian technology. The Tasmanians lacked many technologies found even in similar prehistoric tribal/foraging societies. Their stone tools were simple and unhafted. You can look up images, the stones barely look shaped at all. The Tasmanians therefore had no stone-tipped spears.

Another technology they lacked was bone needles (or bone tools in general), which meant they could not sew clothing like most tribal people who lived in temperate climates. Instead, the Tasmanians mostly covered their bodies in animal fat for warmth, and at most draped whole skins over themselves.

Despite living on an island, the Tasmanians lacked fishing hooks and nets, and therefore did not consume seafood. There is a claim that they lost the ability to make fire and instead had to rely on lightning. However, this claim is contested.

In the 1820s, war broke out between the Tasmanian aboriginals and the British settlers (the “Black War”. Although they by then had access to British guns, the Tasmanians were outnumbered and obviously lacked familiarity with firearms. They were decimated, and the few hundred survivors were relocated onto a nearby island. There, diseases to which they had no immunity reduced their numbers even further.

By the mid-19th century, only a few Tasmanian aboriginals remained alive. The last born before the Black War died in 1876. That left only Fanny Cochrane Smith. She was the last fluent speaker of the Tasmanian language (Palawa). Around 1900, she was recorded. She talks about her early life and then sings a song in Palawa. A second cylinder with a recording of the translation of the song was broken, and is now lost to history. Cochrane Smith died in 1905.

Today, there are a few thousand people who have Tasmanian aboriginal ancestry, but they’re heavily mixed and White-passing. If you have 31 British great-great-great grandparents and 1 Tasmanian, and you don’t speak the Tasmanian language, are you an aboriginal Tasmanian? Can you still call yourself one?

Perhaps most interesting of all is what archaeologists have found on Tasmania in recent decades. They’ve found bone needles, flint arrows, and fishing hooks. However, when scientifically dated, all these artifacts dated from deep prehistory.
The Tasmanians of 30,000 years ago somehow had more sophisticated technology than those of 300 years ago.

What happened was that Tasmania was initially inhabited 30-40,000 years ago. At the time, it was connected via a land bridge to mainland Australia. However, about 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels flooded the land bridge and caused Tasmania to become an island. Over time, technology was lost due to the isolation and small population size. Archaeologists found that after 10,000 years ago, the Tasmanians had slower regressed to simpler and simpler bone tools, until by 3,000 years ago the tools had been discarded entirely. A similar pattern was observed with fishing technology; the ancient Tasmanians consumed seafood, but once they could no longer make hooks, nets, or suitable watercraft, they stopped.

The photo shows the last four surviving aboriginal Tasmanians, taken in 1866.