FootTrack wrote:slparker wrote: I do have a reference on metabolic adaptation in Tasmanian aborigines that i haven't perused yet that probably explains how.
Hey slparker, what's your article/reference called? I'd be really interested to read that as well!
1. Another Tasmanian paradox : clothing and thermal adaptations in aboriginal Australia / Ian Gilligan 2007. This is a book from my university library.
2. Clothing and climate in Aboriginal Australia
I Gilligan - Current Anthropology, 2008 - JSTOR accessible on the web
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/588199
an excerpt from 2:
'Human occupation of Tasmania extends back at least 35,000 years (Cosgrove 1999), a prolonged period of exposure to colder conditions that includes the glacial maximum, when average temperatures fell by between 5° and 7°C (Colhoun and van de Geer 1986; Hopf, Colhoun, and Barton 2000). Enhancement of biological adaptations to cold is not unlikely, as seen, for instance, in the environmental patterning of morphological variation among mainland Aborigines (Gilligan and Bulbeck 2007). This would reduce the physiological need for clothing as thermal protection (Gilligan 2007). Biological cold adaptation constitutes a more plausible reason for the Tasmanians’ comparative lack of clothes than any “maladaptive deterioration” in cultural capacity following the severing of the Bassian land bridge (Henrich 2004, 208–9). Similarly, on the mainland, enhanced cold resistance could contribute to the tendency for increasing clothing reports to plateau in the most southerly mainland zone. Another issue on the mainland relates to possible southward migrations from northern zones associated with the spread of Pama‐Nyungan languages during the Holocene, reducing the time for biological adaptation to occur—although uncertainty remains as to the time depth of any such movements (Clendon 2006).'
I am looking forward to reading through these when my university work load lessens 
