A team of researchers has discovered that Aboriginal Australians settled the arid interior of this country 49,000 years ago, a full 10,000 years earlier than previous thought.
Published in Nature today, the paper “smashed several paradigms about Indigenous Australians,” said co-author Professor Gavin Pridoux. “People were set up in arid southern Australia by about 50,000 years ago and they had all these amazing technologies much earlier than what we’ve thought.”
Lead author Giles Hamm, a consultant archaeologist and doctoral student at La Trobe University, has been working with the Adnyamathanha people over the past nine years to excavate a site discovered purely by accident.
He was surveying gorges in the northern Flinders Rangers with local Adnyamathanha elder Clifford Coulthard when, uh –
“A man getting out of the car to go to the toilet led to the discovery of one of the most important sites in Australian pre-history.”
Nice.
The team of researchers excavated some 4300 artefacts and 200 bone fragments (from 16 mammals and one reptile) over the past decade, dating to human occupation of the site from 49,000 to 46,000 years ago.
It significantly pushed back the dates on the development of technologies such as bone needles and stone tools, and proved human interaction with extinct megafauna like the 1.7-metre tall giant wombat-like creature Diprotodon optatum.
