I recently returned from Crete. Apart from eating fresh local foods, drinking soft Cretan reds, swimming in the Mediterranean, and chatting with friends, the geological and human history captured my interest.

Crete contains 20-million-year-old muds, silts, limestones, and bits of the 140-million year-old ocean floor that have been cooked, broken and bent. On a clear day, the volcanic island of Santorini is visible and, at times, Crete was blanketed with volcanic ash. Sporadic large earthquakes emanate from great depths due to the northward movement of Africa. Rotation of bits of plates produces regular shallow earth tremors from movement along faults. These faults move blocks eastwards and downwards a couple of centimetres each year.

There has been continuous settlement of Crete for up to 700,000 years. Numerous glaciations on 100,000-year cycles allowed people to walk from the mainland when the sea level was low. Palaeolithic people on Crete and the Cyclades islands hunted macrofauna such as deer and dwarf elephants to extinction. Fossil evidence for this exists on nearby Milos where I worked for a decade.

Australian macrofauna was also hunted to extinction. The original people in Australia came from the north during the last glaciation when the sea level was 130 metres lower than now. The most likely time for the first wave of immigrants was immediately after the Toba (Indonesia) supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago when tropical vegetation was destroyed and humans were stressed almost to the point of extinction. It was a case of migrate or die. Low sea levels between 116,000 and 14,700 years ago during glaciation, and proximity to northern islands allowed many waves of immigrants to enter Australia.

In Mesolithic times (9000-7000 BC) on Crete, tools became more refined and in Neolithic times (7000-3500 BC) stone houses were built, ceramics pots were used to carry wine and olives, farming and animal husbandry were practised, beads and jewellery were worn, and there was trade with the mainland and other islands. This did not occur in ancient Australia. People were nomadic, migration on the land was driven by the weather, and there were hundreds of small clans at war with neighbouring clans. Violence and death were everywhere.

In the Bronze Age, the Minoans settled Crete (3500-1460 BC) and were part of an empire that covered the Aegean, western Turkey, southern Greece and northern Egypt. The largest Minoan city on Crete, Knossos, had up to 100,000 inhabitants. Minoans built grand palaces and, in almost 100 cities, built separate commercial, religious, administrative and residential buildings in urban centres. Minoans had ships and used the wheel. No such population centres existed in Australia in pre-European settlement times.

The Minoans conducted trade with what is now Turkey, Egypt, and Greece, wrote indecipherable texts on stone and clay tablets that evolved from one style to another, carved figurines, made pottery which evolved with changes in technology and culture, used bronze and copper tools, made gold-peridot jewellery using materials derived from outside Crete and, it appears, that there were two parallel civilisations living together.

The Minoan empire was destroyed by the eruption of Santorini about 1600 BC and the weakened Crete was then dominated by Mycenaean warriors from the north who blended cultures after much plundering and killing (1450-1100 BC). Nomadic Australian aboriginals stayed Palaeolithic without writing, pottery, ceramics, long-distance ships, wheels, bronze or gold-gem jewellery.

The Dorians from northern Greece displaced the Mycenaeans and ruled from 1100-900 BC. They spoke Greek and had blonde hair and blue eyes, a characteristic that some Cretans still retain. They had metal javelins and ornate pottery and enslaved the locals. Some Cretans escaped to the nearly inaccessible forested mountains. In a later Greek period from 900-650 BC, the Phoenician alphabet was used and there were city states with more sophisticated pottery. In the classical Greek period, Crete did not fight the Persians but there were long and intense wars off and on for hundreds of years between Cretan cities. The island was deforested for buildings and ships and pockets of the original forests remain in isolated mountainous regions. Australian aboriginal deforestation by fire was to facilitate hunting.

A massive earthquake in 368 BC destroyed 80 of the 100 cities on Crete. There were various unhealthy alliances between cities and empires. At one time there was an alliance between Cretan cities and the King of Macedonia, Phillip V. There was war with Rhodes and later the Romans which ended with Roman occupation of Crete from 67 BC until 350 AD. After the death of Constantine the Great, Crete became part of the Byzantium Empire. The island was later overrun by Arabs who arrived in 40 ships. Some Cretans have Arabic features. The second Byzantine Period (961-1204 AD) started with retribution for Arab barbarism and some 40,000 Arab soldiers were killed in battle with 160,000 Arab soldiers and citizens beheaded later.

In 1204 AD, the Byzantine prince Alexios gave Crete to the Fourth Crusade leader Boniface Monferatico who then sold Crete to the Doge of Venice for 5,000 gold ducats. A Cretan aristocracy developed in parallel to a Venetian aristocracy, the island became prosperous through trade but a large earthquake in 1508 AD again weakened Crete.

The Venetians were attacked many times by the Turks and finally succumbed. The Turks imposed heavy taxes on the locals and repelled attacks from the Venetians and Greeks. Internal revolutions plagued Crete which became Greek again in 1898 AD. After bitter costly battles, Crete was captured by the Germans in the second world war. There are more than 2,000 Commonwealth war graves on Crete, many containing Australians. After the war, Crete again became Greek.

The story of Crete is one of multiple invasions, interbreeding, genocide, violence and survival over thousands of years, as in Australia. In Europe, there were tens of thousands of years of clans and tribes constantly at war before consolidation into nations over the last millennium. This did not happen in Australia. If sometime in the last 500 years Australia had been colonised by the Chinese or Portuguese, the aboriginal population would have been almost totally destroyed as in Dorian and Arabic times on Crete.

Humans migrated many times from the Rift Valley of East Africa to all parts of the globe over the last 1.75 million years. The only endemic humans with a continuous occupation are those still living in the Rift Valley. All others were immigrants sometime in the past. In many parts of Europe, Africa and Asia, there has been continuous migration and occupation by humans for far longer than there has been occupation of Australia which only occurred during the latest glaciation. Human occupation of the Americas from Russia took place towards the end of the last glaciation around 15,000 years ago.

Who is a Cretan? Is it someone with Palaeolithic, Minoan, Roman, Venetian, Byzantine, Turkish or Greek blood? Is it a Greek speaker who lives on Crete? Should those Cretans with Dorian features have more rights than those with Arabic features?

About 70 per cent of Australians are indigenous. What is an Australian aboriginal? Will aboriginals ever be legally defined quantitively using DNA? How many generations can we go back before a culture is totally diluted? Cretans don’t care about their race, colour or genetic lineage. They are all equal, proud to be Cretan and just get on with life. We must be smart and learn from the Cretans that unity rather than division enriches and strengthens a culture.