Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • proper noun The continent that contains the islands of Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania, especially during the ice ages of the Pleistocene when these were connected by solid land.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From the name “Sahull” and “Sahoel” of a submerged sandbank between Australia and Timor on Dutch maps of the 17th century. From this the continental shelf was given the name “Sahul Shelf”, and the continent including the dry shelf was called Sahul.

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Examples

  • Tasmania, Australia, Papua New Guinea and the patch of islands between the latter two all make up a single ancient continent, called Sahul, and as global sea levels rose and fell throughout the ice ages of the past 100,000 years, the forbidding straits of ocean between them occasionally disappeared, replaced by lush, tropical landbridges.

    mental_floss Blog 2009

  • This Ice Age land, known to geologists as Sunda, was separated from New Guinea and Australia (Sahul) by only a narrow strait of open water.

    3. South and Southeast Asia 2001

  • These lizards, distantly related to dinosaurs, are part of Papuan forest fauna, which preserves fragments of Sahul, the continent that existed before New Guinea and Australia became two separate islands.

    Wired Top Stories Danielle Venton 2011

  • Primitive as the tools may be, the first inhabitants of Australia must have possessed advanced boat-building technology to cross from the nearest point in Asia to Sahul, the ancient continent that included Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania until the rise of sea level that occurred at the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago.

    NYT > Home Page By NICHOLAS WADE 2011

  • It seemed to me probable, that if such a bank existed and had any connexion to the north-east, it was more likely to be with the Sahul Shoal than with

    A Voyage to Terra Australis — Volume 2 Matthew Flinders 1794

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