When whites first colonised Tasmania, there were several things which struck them as very strange about the native inhabitants.
Firstly, their technology was, even by Australian aboriginal standards, incredibly limited and primitive. Unlike their mainland Australian relatives, the Tasmanians "had no hafted implements (such as axes), no implements made of bone, no boomerangs or spear throwers, no dingos and no microlithic stone tools. Indeed, their entire tool kit seems to have consisted of about two dozen kinds of objects." (Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters.
On top of this, the Tasmanians were one of the only peoples on earth who did not have the ability to make fire. When a band moved from camp to camp they carried smouldering fire-sticks, which they used to kindle fires at the new location. It was a great shame to allow these sticks to go out (which would have happened easily in Tasmania's wet and windy winters). A band that lost their fire had to eat raw meat until they found another band from which to get fire. It was utterly taboo to refuse another band's request for fire, even if the band were enemies or a band with which you were at war.
Secondly, the whites noticed that the Tasmanians never ate scale fish. They ate shellfish in abundance, along with lobsters and seaweed, but no fish with scales. This was despite living on an island surrounded by vast quantities of fish. When whites offered any kind of scale fish to Tasmanian Aborigines they either fled in terror or even reacted with violence.
For a long time it was assumed that these peculiarities were simply because the Tasmanians were the most primitive people on earth. It was thought that they were only able to survive despite these 'primitive' traits because of their isolation and, after Darwin, they were regarded as some kind of 'missing link' - barely human. This was also used to partly justify their extinction, as though it was nothing to do with the war waged against them by the settlers and was because they were doomed to die out anyway.
These views began to change in the 1960s and 70s, when archaeologists made some startling finds. Analaysis of camp sites which had been continuously occupied for over 7000 years revealed that up until 3,500 years ago, the Tasmanians actually DID have most of the technology of the mainland tribes. Small, finely made microlithic tools - quite unlike the larger, clumsier tools of the later Tasmanians, were found in abundance. So were bone needles, also unknown from later finds, indicating that the earlier Tasmanians did sew fur clothing. It seemed that the Tasmanians had once been far more technologically sophisticated. Then, quite suddenly, 3,500 years ago, all these things disappear from the archaeological record.
The other remarkable find was that the early Tasmanian DID eat scale fish. In fact, they ate so much of it that it seemed to form 10-15% of their total diet. Then, quite suddenly, all fish bones and scales disappear from the record as well.
The strange thing is that, like the sudden decline in their technology, the evidence of eating fish also disappeared about 3,500 years ago.
So the puzzle was 'why?' Why would the Tasmanians suddenly stop using their more complex technology. And why would they suddenly stop eating fish? And, most importantly, why would both things happen suddenly and apparently simultaneously?
There is no definitive answer, but there is one theory which seems to explain both things.
Fish are a great source of protein, but they also have some risks: food poisoning for example. The waters around Tasmania are sometimes prone to large outbreaks of a agal bloom called 'dinoflagellatae' or 'Red Tide'. This algae can infest large fish populations, killing the fish in vast numbers. The problem here is that if these fish are then eaten by humans, the result is usually chronic food poisoning, often leading to a very sudden death.
The hypothesis is that such a bloom killed large numbers of fish, giving the Tasmanians an (apparently) free summer feast on the beach. The result would have been a sudden, massive case of almost certainly fatal food poisoning - resulting in most of the adult population dying in the space of a week.
The survivors would have been on the brink on extinciton, but obviously survived. It's also likely that some parts of the population would have been less affected by others - small children who were still being weaned are likely to have been less likely to have been poisoned.
This would have resulted in a bizarre situation. The surviving generation would have been made up of a disproportinate population of orphaned children, who then had to teach themselves survival skills. Simpler technologies - spears and primitive stone tools - would have been within their capacity. More complex technology like fire-making, fine tools, hafted weapons etc would have been beyond them, the knowledge for making them lost with the dead elders.
So when the whites arrived, the Tasmanians they met were the descendants of these child survivors of the cataclysm of 3500 years before - people with very simple tools, no ability to make fire and a pathological fear of eating scale fish. Understandably so.
It's not the definite answer to the puzzle, but it seems to explain the mystery. The idea of a generation of children reviving their culture from scratch - a Tasmanian-wide 'Lord of the Flies' is also a bizarre and intriguing possibility.
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