Tasmania

Tasmania is an island state of Australia south of the mainland. Sapiens uses it first as a world sealed off for 12,000 years and then as the scene of the destruction of its native people.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind	Yuval Noah Harari	subject	Island cut off for 12,000 years whose native people were then destroyed within a century of Cook.

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind — Yuval Noah Harari (2014)

Source: Original · Readwise highlight

Consider Tasmania, a medium-sized island south of Australia.

• Role: subject
• In the book: Cut off from Australia around 10,000 BC by rising seas, Tasmania held a few thousand hunter-gatherers who had no outside contact for 12,000 years. Later the book returns to it: within a century of Cook’s arrival settlers drove the Tasmanians off the best land and hunted them, the survivors were confined by missionaries, and anthropologists took their remains; Truganini’s skeleton was buried only in 1976.
• Why it matters: It serves twice: as the purest example of an isolated human world, and as the starkest case of science and empire working together against a native people.