Humans first arrived in Australia 65,000 years ago, study suggests
The timing of the first arrival of humans in Australia has been studied and debated for decades. Now, researchers have found evidence that suggests the ancestors of aboriginal Australians landed in the northern part of Australia at least 65,000 years ago.
The finding, which was published July 19 in the journal Nature, pushes back the timing of when people first came to the continent by about 5,000 to 18,000 years. It also suggests that humans coexisted with colossal Australian animals like giant wombats and wallabies long before the megafauna went extinct.
Previous archaeological digs and dating had suggested people migrated to Australia between 47,000 and 60,000 years ago. But a new excavation at an aboriginal rock shelter called Madjedbebe revealed human relics that dated back 65,000 years. The Madjedbebe site had been studied in the 1970s. But during more recent visits in 2012 and 2015, Clarkson and his colleagues recovered more than 11,000 artifacts from the deepest layers of the excavation pit. In addition to uncovering leftovers of an ancient campfire and archaic mortars and pestles, they also found flaked stone tools and painting material. They also unearthed the earliest known examples of edge-ground axes, which were 20,000 years older than those found anywhere else in the world. Chris Clarkson, an archaeologist from the University of Queensland in Australia and lead author, said the findings provide evidence against a prevailing theory that people rapidly drove Australia’s largest animals to extinction shortly after arriving on the continent.