The Am Islands lie near the edge ot the Australian continental shelf in the Arafura Sea, approximately 150 km south of the coast of Papua (formerly Irian Jaya). For at least the first 40,000 years of occupation of Sahul they formed part of a continuous land bridge linking Australia and New Guinea. During this time they would have been a dissected limestone plateau on the exposed Carpentarian Plain. About 14,000 years BP sea level rose and began to encircle the island group, separating it from Australia and by 11,500 years BP it was completely separated from New Guinea. The presence on Am of numerous marsupials, the cassowary and Birds of Paradise attest to this shared history, a fact first recognised by Darwin’s co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (Wallace 1869).

Series: Advances in Geoecology (34). Chapter 14, pages 279--306.