A (literally) groundbreaking archaeological dig in Kakadu, Northern Territory has found that Aboriginal people arrived in Australia 18,000 years earlier than previously thought. The research, carried out on-site over several years, seems to confirm that Australia has been inhabited for at least 65,000 years.
The dig, located at the Madjedbebe rock shelter near Jabiru and carried out under supervision of the traditional owners of the land, the Mirarr people, uncovered thousands of artefacts, including the world’s oldest edge-ground stone axes – other civilisations wouldn’t make tools like it for another 20,000 years.
Some of the artefacts researchers discovered could be up to 80,000 years old.
it really is
The findings, published today in Nature, up-end a lot of previously-held assumptions not just about human populations in Australia, but around the world.
Lead author of the research, Associate Professor Chris Clarkson from the University of Queensland, told The Guardian:
“People got here much earlier than we thought, which means of course they must also have left Africa much earlier to have travelled on their long journey through Asia and south-east Asia to Australia.“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.”
Alongside the incredible axes and tools, researchers also found ochre “crayon”, which point to ancient Australian people creating art millennia before the famous cave paintings in western Europe. There’s even evidence that the people living in the Madjedbebe shelter were making sparkly pigments, which is pretty damn cool.
Check out the write-up at The Conversation and the article in Nature, both by written by scientists on the dig, for heaps more info about this amazing site, including the landmark agreement between local people and researchers that allowed the dig to go ahead with community engagement in every part of the process.
Source: The Guardian / ABC.
Image: Twitter / @james_felicity.
