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From what I've gathered at a glance, Aborigine Australians have about 50000 years of history on their continent, roughly equivalent to that of people on other continents. Yet from what I can gather, aborigine civilizations had less advanced technology than their Old World counterparts.

While Jared Diamond argues that agriculture was not as easily possible, a cursory Wikipedia search at Agriculture in Australia suggests that the temperate and subtropical climate areas are plentiful in the country.

I'm not much of a geography expert, but if I were to apply the concept of a "hot, dry" climate, then the Arab world comes to mind, and the Arab world had plenty of ancient civilizations that were able to develop agriculture.

Were there any other sources of troubles for Aborigines that prevented their discovering other technologies? Isolation might've certainly been a factor, but even then, if we were to take ancient Japan, civilization developed at a more rapid pace there even before seafaring was discovered.

This is a class of question we here on History.SE called a Guns, Germs, and Steel question. This is because we get a lot of them, and even though the question details may be different, the answers to all of them are almost identical, and could be penned by anyone who has read that book. We don't have a "required reading list", but if we did, GG&S would be on it. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy at your favorite book source.

But first off, the original title of the question implied that Native Australians weren't even at the Paleolithic level. That's egregiously wrong. The entire Genus of our species started using stone tools 3.3 million years ago. Its essentially what defines us. Native Australians were not only using stone tools (Paleolithic), but stone tipped projectiles and boats (Mesolithic).^*

The requirement for jumping from Mesolithic to Neolithic is domesticating crops and/or livestock. Obviously this depends on the availability of domesticable flora and fauna. This is where Australia poses problems. It has no native plant or animal species that humanity has found to be of any real domesticable use. To a certain extent this is understandable, as the continent is rather small compared to Eurasia or the Americas, and a huge percentage of what little it does have is desert.

It does have an interesting and unusual variety of fauna, but little of it resembles the fauna humanity has domesticated elsewhere in the world. All the large mammals humans have domesticated elsewhere are placentals within a certain small niche of behavior. There are loads of useful-looking animals humans can't domesticate (Diamond's examples are zebras and cheetahs). Only a very few species can be domesticated, and Australia had very poor luck in that regard. Their luck hasn't improved any by the importation of Europeans; all the domesticated species used in Australia today were brought in by immigrants.

^{* - If this was an honest mistake on your part, well now you know. But it happens to be one that is rather insulting to the people it describes, implying they aren't even really humans, so its a suspicious one. If someone told you this, they put you in a very awkward position by putting this idea in your head, so I'd highly suggest protecting yourself in the future by not paying attention to anything they tell you.}

T.E.D. answer is correct from my point of view (I also agree with Diamond theory regarding to availability of plants and animals as a must for civilized life). But, to give a little bit more context. Maybe we can divide the answer in two:

1. Domestication of crops and animals as a basic requirement for civilized life.

This is one of the pillars in Diamond theory. As far as we know, there are few examples of advanced civilization in cultures before neolithic (neolithic means that farming is developed), only Göbekli Tepe comes to my mind (to build something like that you need an organization that is not avaible in small societies of hunter/gatherers). Once farming is available, people can be sedentary. From here diversification of work is possible and social life can change. Since we're talking about a theory, and we have a single Earth, no more samples are available to confirm it.

Summary: The theory says that for civilized life you need first animals/plants domesticated. If we agree with that, we can jump to next point.

2. Availability of crops and animals suitable for domestication in Australia.

This is the main issue. As long as I know, not a single plant or animal has ever been domesticated in Australia. But this does not mean that there are not plants or animals available, after all, native australians had to eat something.

So, since nowadays edible plants are available for grow at home, the question is: Why native australians did not became farmers using those plants? Maybe this question belongs more to gardening instead of history, I only can suppose that those plants did not give enough calories in exchange of the effort required to grow them in first place.

If we agree with the first answer. Then we must search whether the second answer is correct. Even though Göbekli Tepe might be an example that is not covered by Diamond theory.

Another theory belongs to Toynbee, who says that only a challenge to the lifestyle (for example, an invasion or a climate change) causes a change in people's mind. A change in the mind of people is a must in order to change your lifestyle, to force a society to change to a sedentary style for example.

If we do not know any case of climate change in Australia at the end of last glaciar age (neolithic started after that in Eurasia), in the same fashion that happened in Eurasia, then that challenge was not present in Australia.

Everyone else is referencing Guns Germs and Steel, but I'm going to give the answer from The Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage.

Gammage suggests that not only did Indigenous Australians discover a form of agriculture, they developed an agricultural technology that Europeans didn't even realise was possible.

The development of technology is not necessarily a linear progression with cavemen at the bottom and Englishmen at the top, but the early English settlers of Australia were sure it was. So they were unable to see the evidence of indigenous technology even when it was used right before their eyes.

One settler (in the east, which is not a desert) might wonder at how "well gee, this landscape looks more like an English lord's estate than a natural wilderness" and the next day joke "gosh the natives love setting fires everywhere they're so funny" and not realise that, in fact, one of these things actually explains the other.

The landscape looked like a park because Indigenous Australians controlled the entire ecosystem by using lots of different kinds of fire: different patterns of burning, different heat intensity, different season, different length of time between burnings. All of these factors change which plants will thrive in an area. Grass recovers faster from destruction by fire than forest does, but trees are more resistant to low intensity fire than grass. Some native plants actually cannot breed unless their seed pods are roasted. And so on. Which animals live where will depend on the amount and type of vegetation, and of course fires can be used to drive wild animals between locations too.

In this way they were able to control which plants and animals could live where over vast areas of land with relatively little labour. And they used this to make nice grassland to walk through, with occasional trees for shade, and combinations of edible plants in close proximity that would not naturally be found together. They left patches of forest cover, and trees along the river bank, to cultivate the conditions for prey animals to live, which they would hunt. Over long periods of time they would be able to move the patches of forest as they saw fit.

Arguably this makes the entire land their farm. Europeans blundered in and thought they didn't have farms, but what they really didn't have (aside from the obvious, like ploughs and fences) was the belief that any part of the world wasn't everybody's farm.

Since we came in and stopped them setting fires, some areas have become dense forest now that weren't forest at all in the 1700s. The patterns of vegetation in 1788 were in many places more man made than true wilderness.

And I'm sure people would sometimes spread the seeds of plants they liked to eat, too. They just didn't tend them in little plots with fences.

What appeared to be natural bridges created by trees falling over streams could be created deliberately by digging out the roots on the river-facing side of the tree. Another way they controlled the landscape in a way that was invisible to European settlers.

(Here ends the part I got from The Biggest Estate on Earth; now for some other random observations about indigenous innovation)

Other cultures invented mnemonic devices like epic poetry to preserve cultural knowledge before literacy. Indigenous Australians invented an even more advanced form of this mnemonic technology; their songlines are songs that tell you how to get from A to B (including major landmarks and sources of food and water along the way) in the format of a religious narrative that might also teach other cultural lessons, and the routes cross so the combination of multiple songlines forms a complete 2D map of your people's territory. I think that's actually really clever. Imagine how great it would be if all the parts of your brain that you use to remember pop song lyrics were instead holding a detailed and accurate map!

How come Aboriginal Australians didn't manage to raise their civilization levels to that of other continents?

It might be a fine point but, GG&S was more about competition between civilizations rather than whether one civilization advanced or not. In fact GG&S was rather silent on scientific advanced civilizations except when it came to 3 specific technologies which became important when two civilizations clashed. Those technologies were

• how early or if they developed Guns,


• how early or if they developed steel.


• how strong their germs were
  
  
  • whether they domesticated animals, dependent upon whether animals suitable for domestication were present on their continent,
  
  
  • latitudinal width of their home continent
  
  

Aboriginal Australians likely didn't advance as fast as other civilizations because their was no pressure on them too. Australia is a big isolated place and the first Australians had abundance of water, food, game and land all wrapped up on a temperate climate. They didn't need to innovate. Didn't need to pressure themselves to survive or outcompete one another for resources or even overcome invaders.

Also they didn't benefit from other cultures innovations like civilizations which grew up proximal to other civilizations did in Eurasia. In Eurasia's community of nations one civilization invents the wheel, bronze, iron, gunpowder and it spreads to multiple civilizations through trade. Aboriginal Australians didn't benefit from such proximity.

More on GG&S

Guns Germs and Steel assembles a collections of ideas over why Britain or England rose militarily and was able to basically conquer and dominate a global empire relative to Papua New Guinea. An island about the same size as England which didn't have the same military successes. More broadly why Eurasian civilizations when they came in contact with North Central South American, African, and Australian civilizations invariable came out on top. The answer notes that diseases did the majority of the killing when such Civilizations met; Eurasia civilizations have more plentiful germs given their wide longitudinal span, and abundance of domesticated animals which lived in close proximity to the populations ( horse, ox, mule, cow etc ). That and how quickly they developed steel and gunpowder were additional factors.