Earliest evidence of Aboriginal occupation of Australian coast discovered // Australian dig finds evidence of Aboriginal habitation up to 80,000 years ago
Australia’s earliest
known site of human occupation of the Australian coast has been discovered in a
remote cave in Western Australia, pushing back the start date of Indigenous
occupation to more than 50,000 years ago. Archaeologists led by
the University of Western
Australia found evidence of inhabitation on Barrow Island in the
country’s north west, discovering charcoal, animal remains and ancient
artefacts that confirmed hunter-gatherer occupation.
Located 60 kilometres
off the Pilbara coast, the Boodie cave on Barrow Island was cut off from the
mainland roughly 7,000 years ago due to rising sea levels. But researchers found
the cave had been used as a hunting shelter from as early as 50,000 years ago,
before becoming a residential base for groups of families from 10,000 years
ago. “This pushes back the
age of occupation from the previous and more conservative limit of 47,000 years
ago,” said lead archaeologist Peter Veth. “Even older dates are entirely
plausible.”
The researchers said
the site contained the longest record of dietary fauna in Australia. “Barrow
Island provided rich records of ancient artefacts, gathering and hunting of
marine and arid animals, and environmental signatures which show the use of a
now-drowned coastal desert landscape,” said Veth. “Particularly in the north west of Barrow
Island there were rock shelters and deep chambers and caves where there were
excellent and well-preserved remains ... we managed to piece together a picture
of this extraordinary adaptation. The first evidence of Australians living on
the coastline [and] the first Australians.” “The cave was used
predominately as a hunting shelter between about 50,000 and 30,000 years ago
before becoming a residential base for family groups after 10,000 years ago. It
was abandoned by about 7,000 years ago when rising sea levels finally cut it
off from the mainland,” he said... read more:
Australian dig finds evidence of Aboriginal habitation up to 80,000 years ago
A groundbreaking
archaeological discovery in Australia’s north has extended the known length of
time Aboriginal people have inhabited the continent to at least 65,000 years.
The findings on about
11,000 artefacts from Kakadu national park, published on Thursday in the
journal Nature, prove Indigenous people have been in Australia for far longer
than the much-contested estimates of between 47,000 and 60,000 years, the
researchers said. Some of the artefacts were potentially as old as 80,000
years.
The new research
upends decades-old estimates about the human colonisation of the continent,
their interaction with megafauna, and the dispersal of modern humans from
Africa and across south Asia.
“People got here much
earlier than we thought, which means of course they must also have left Africa
much earlier to have traveled on their long journey through Asia and south-east
Asia to Australia,” said the lead author, Associate Prof Chris Clarkson, from
the University of Queensland.
“It also means the
time of overlap with the megafauna, for instance, is much longer than
originally thought – maybe as much as 20,000 or 25,000 years. It puts to rest
the idea that Aboriginal people wiped out the megafauna very quickly.”
Clarkson said the
Madjedbebe rock shelter where the artefacts were found – which has been
excavated four times since the 1970s – had been controversial in the past, but
the processes used to date the artefacts meant the team could say “precisely”
that the area was occupied 65,000 years ago and “hopefully put the controversy
to rest”. The findings also
suggested people crossed over from south Asia at a time that was cooler and
wetter, with lower sea levels allowing easier sea crossings.
read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/19/dig-finds-evidence-of-aboriginal-habitation-up-to-80000-years-ago
