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The earliest peopling of Australia has long been a fascinating and sometimes contentious question. Estimates from previous research were that Homo sapiens arrived in Australia by about 47,000 years ago, and possibly as long ago as 60,000 years ago.

Dr Chris Clarkson and his team from the University of Queensland announced in the journal Nature results of a new excavation at an aboriginal rock shelter called Madjedbebe which pushed back human occupation of Australia to 65,000 years ago!

While this site had been excavated in the 1970s, new digs in 2012 and 2015 recovered over ten thousand new artifacts from the site, including the earliest known edge-ground axes (stone axes that would have had handles). The site had been previously radiocarbon dated, but radiocarbon cannot accurately date sediments older than roughly 50,000 years. Clarkson’s team used optically stimulated luminescence (or OSL) dating on 52 samples of the sediments surrounding lithic artifacts in the deepest layers to get the new ancient dates.

Using multiple dating techniques, they showed that the range of artifact deposits at the site ranged from 10,000 years ago all the way back to 65,000 years ago. They also conducted extensive studies of the stone tools to try and understand the technological advancement of these early native Australian settlers, examined ancient plant remains preserved at the site to understand what plants people may have been eating, and analyzed the size distribution of sediment grains to investigate the ancient soils. All these methods came together to tell the story of a people grinding a variety of foods including seeds, fruits, other plants, and animals, eating nuts and yams, making ochre “crayons”, and using reflective pigment 65,000 years ago in northern Australia.

Importantly, this find overturns the hypothesis that Homo sapiens drove the megafauna of Australia to extinction soon after they arrived on the continent, since climate and fossil data show a decline in Australian megafauna at 45,000 to 43,100 years ago, well after the new evidence for human arrival.

Researchers excavating the site worked closely with the local aboriginal community in an effort to acknowledge the importance of this site and to make sure the ownership and stewardship of the site stayed with its ancestral people. The University of Queensland and the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation worked together to give final say over the excavation and the artifacts to the Mirarr, who are the traditional owners of the site.

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