'A big jump': People might have lived in Australia twice as long as we thought
Extensive archaeological research in southern Victoria has again raised the prospect that people have lived in Australia for 120,000 years – twice as long as the broadly accepted period of human continental habitation.
The research, with its contentious potential implications for Indigenous habitation of the continent that came to be Australia, has been presented to the Royal Society of Victoria by a group of academics including Jim Bowler, the eminent 88-year-old geologist who in 1969 and 1974 discovered the bones of Mungo Lady and Mungo Man, the oldest human remains found in Australia.
Mungo Man, his remains discovered in a dry water bed in the Willandra Lakes district of New South Wales, lived some 42,000 years ago. He was a modern human or homo sapien, Indigenous to Australia, who was buried with sophisticated funerary rites including the use of fire and ochre. Earlier contentious scientific research that pointed to human habitation in Australia up to 120,000 years ago – including in the Kimberley – has been largely dismissed.
The new research at Moyjil (Point Ritchie), at the mouth of the Hopkins River at Warrnambool, south-east Victoria, relates to the presence of fire, small black stones and scattered shell middens around steep cliffs.
The research is presented in an article, released by CSIRO publishing, titled The Moyjil Site, South-West Victoria, Australia: Fire And Environment In A 120,000-Year Coastal Midden – Nature or People. Its co-authors are David Price from the University of Wollongong, John Sherwood from Deakin University and Stephen Carey from Federation University, Ballarat.
The article’s abstract reads: “Thermal luminescence analyses of blackened stones provide ages in the ... range ... 100-130 ka [thousand years], consistent with independent stratigraphic evidence and contem
poraneous with the age of the surface in which they lie. The distribution of fire-darkened stones is inconsistent with wildfire effects. Two hearth-like features closely associated with the disconformity provide further indication of potential human agency. The data are consistent with the suggestion of human presence at Warrnambool during the last Interglacial.”
There is some evidence, though not yet conclusive, of a designated “place of fire” at the site, the paper says, though “the validity of the human connotation of ‘fireplace’ remains to be established”.
“The evidence is consistent with the features being a substantial ‘place of fire’, but can it be described as a ‘fireplace’ with the human connotation of that term?”, the academics ask.
They write, based on 11 years of research at the site, how the evidence indicates that the blackened stones