Oldest known evidence of Aboriginal settlement in arid Australia found in Flinders Ranges rock shelter 
 
 Updated 
 
 The chance discovery of a rock shelter in the Flinders Ranges has unearthed one of the most important prehistoric sites in Australia. 
 
 Key points: Dating of artefacts and fossils from Warratyi indicates human settlement between 49,000 and 46,000 years ago 
 
 Timing shows people moved through central Australia and used key technologies such as stone axes and ochre much earlier than previously thought 
 
 Archaeological evidence also shows humans lived alongside, and hunted megafauna 
 
 The site, known as Warratyi, shows Aboriginal Australians settled the arid interior of the country around 49,000 years ago — some 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. 
 
 The shelter, about 550 kilometres north of Adelaide, also contains the first reliably dated evidence of human interaction with megafauna. 
 
 Artefacts excavated at the site also push back the earliest-known dates on the development of key bone and stone axe technologies and the use of ochre in Australia. 
 
 Lead author Giles Hamm, a consultant archaeologist and doctoral student at La Trobe University, found the site with local Adnyamathanha elder Clifford Coulthard while surveying gorges in the northern Flinders Ranges. 
 
 "Nature called and Cliff walked up this creek bed into this gorge and found this amazing spring surrounded by rock art," Mr Hamm said. 
 
 "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." 
 
 Mr Hamm said during a survey of the gorge they noticed a rock shelter with a blackened roof about 20 metres above the creek bed. 
 
 "Immediately when we saw that we thought, 'Wow, that's people lighting fires inside that rock shelter, that's human activity'," he said. 
 
 At the time they had no idea how significant the find was, Mr Hamm admitted, and thought maybe it would reach back about 5,000 years. 
 
 Excavations reveal treasure trove of artefacts and bones 
 
 Working with the Adnyamathanha people over the past nine years, Mr Hamm and colleagues recovered from the one-metre-deep excavations around 4,300 artefacts and 200 bone fragments from 16 mammals and one reptile. 
 
 Importantly dating of the artefacts and fossil finds show humans occupied the site from 49,000 to 46,000 years ago. 
 
 Mr Hamm said the significance of the site was the combination of its age and geographic location. 
 
 The previous oldest-known site in the arid zone, located at Puritjarra in western Central Australia, is around 38,000 years old. 
 
 "[This discovery] puts people moving south from the northern part of the continent to the southern interior a lot sooner than we thought," he said. 
 
 However, Mr Hamm said it was likely the climate was more favourable when they arrived. 
 
 "They got there before it became really arid," he said. 
 
 "In one sense they were trapped in the Flinders Ranges because once the climate changed [due to the last glacial maximum] it was too risky to move out of these well-watered ranges that had these permanent springs." 
 
 It was a view supported by palaeoanthropologist Michael Westaway at Griffith University, who was part of a recent genomic study that confirmed modern Aboriginal Australians are the descendants of the first people to inhabit Australia and showed they adapted genetically to survive in the desert. 
 
 "Our DNA paper suggested the arid centre at 50,000 years ago was not really a barrier to the movement of people, and this seems to be what Giles is suggesting — people were able to migrate south quite quickly," Dr Westaway said. 
 
 Among the other significant artefact finds at the site was the earliest-known use of ochre in Australia and South-East Asia around 49,000-46,000 years ago. 
 
 Mr Hamm said they had pushed back the dates on the development of technologies such as bone needles (40,000-38,000 years ago), wood-handled stone tools (at least 24,000 years ago) and gypsum use (40,000-33,000 years ago). 
 
 The site also provided reliably dated evidence of hafted axe technology about 38,000 years ago. 
 
 Evidence dates cohabitation with megafauna 
 
 Co-author Professor Gavin Prideaux pointed to the discovery of bones from the extinct giant wombat-like Diprotodon optatum and eggs from an ancient giant bird as important evidence of interaction with ancient humans which would have an impact on the debate over the extinction of megafauna. 
 
 Professor Prideaux, from Flinders University's School of Biological Sciences, said the only previous site in Australia where megafauna remains and human artefacts had been found together was Cuddie Springs in NSW, which had become the subject of controversy over the accuracy of dating. 
 
 "One good thing about this study ... is there's no doubt there are megafauna remains in the form of Diprotodon and a giant bird in that rock shelter in a well-dated, well-stratified context sometime between 45,000 and 50,000 years ago," Professor Prideaux said. 
 
 "The only way those bones and shells got there [because of the steep incline up to the rock shelter] is because people brought them there [to eat] ... in terms of megafauna that's the really significant finding." 
 
 Professor Prideaux said the discovery was an important milestone in the debate over whether humans or climate change drove the extinction of megafauna. 
 
 "[The find] undermines one of the supposed pillars of support for climate change, not humans, causing the extinctions because [the Warrayti site shows] humans lived alongside these animals and hunted them," he said. 
 
 Professor Prideaux said the paper, published yesterday in Nature, "smashed several paradigms about Indigenous Australians". 
 
 "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." 
 
 Dr Westaway supported this view. 
 
 "There is a Eurocentric view that material culture in Australia is quite simplistic and backward, but this helps rewrite that story," he said. 
 
 Elders told stories of shelters 
 
 Mr Coulthard, of the Adnyamathanha Traditional Lands Association, said he had worked on the property where Warratyi was located when he was a teenager. 
 
 The elders he had worked with had told him their people had lived in the area and had pointed out a lot of the shelters. 
 
 He had forgotten the information until he teamed up with Mr Hamm and believed "the spirits showed me the road" to the site. 
 
 He said the Adnyamathanha people were proud and happy about the discovery and interested to know how it would be received. 
 
 Topics: science-and-technology, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, archaeology, sa 
 
 First posted ||||| A chance discovery at a rock shelter in southern Australia has revealed a human settlement dating back 49,000 years. 
 
 Archaeologist Giles Hamm was surveying the territory in Flinders Ranges with aboriginal elder Clifford Coulthard when his colleague needed a toilet break. 
 
 "Nature called and Cliff walked up this creek bed into this gorge and found this amazing spring surrounded by rock art," Mr Hamm told ABC news. 
 
 "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." 
 
 Image: The finding is crucial in understanding human settlement in Australia. Pic Giles Hamm 
 
 What sparked the archaeologists' interest was a rock shelter with a blackened roof because, Mr Hamm told ABC, "that's people lighting fires inside that rock shelter, that's human activity". 
 
 Sophisticated tools and bone fragments from the largest ever marsupial were found at the site. 
 
 Eventually some 4,300 objects and 200 bone fragments were recovered. 
 
 Scientists working with Mr Hamm's team have determined the age of the site at 49,000 years. 
 
 Aboriginal Australians are the oldest continued civilisation in the world, descending from the first people to leave Africa, according to a genetic study published by the University of Copenhagen in September. 
 
 Image: Scientists determined the age of the site at 49,000 years. Pic Giles Hamm 
 
 But the time of arrival of the first Australians is debated among researchers. The consensus view is they arrived 50,000 years ago. 
 
 But Mr Hamm said their presence 49,000 years ago at a site in southern Australia suggested they must have reached northern parts far earlier. 
 
 "If people did come 50,000 years ago, it doesn't give them much time to move so far south," Mr Hamm said. 
 
 "There could have been colonisation much earlier than the accepted time frame of 50,000 years ago. It could be 55,000 maybe 60,000 years ago." 
 
 Image: Flinders Ranges is 550km north of Adelaide. Pic Giles Hamm 
 
 The site also contained evidence of human interaction with mega fauna, namely the Diprotodon optatum - a marsupial measuring 2m in height and weighing more than 2,500kg. 
 
 Scientists have previously puzzled over how humans had interacted with them. 
 
 But the presence of bones from juvenile animals in a cave on a cliff suggests they were hunted, said Gavin Prideaux, palaeontologist at Flinders University in South Australia. 
 
 "Those animals weren't built to climb up a cliff into the settlement, the only way they could have got there was through human agency," he said. ||||| Humans arrived in the arid interior of Australia some 10,000 years earlier than we thought, archaeologists suggest, with the discovery of ancient artefacts in a South Australian cave that have been dated to as far back as 49,000 years ago. 
 
 That means once humans first set foot on the Australian coastline, it took a mere 1,000 years for them to expand out into its dry interior - further evidence of the ingenuity of what now stands as the oldest continuous civilisation on Earth. 
 
 The site, which is a newly discovered cave in the Flinders Ranges, about 550 km north of Adelaide, is known as the Warratyi rock-shelter. 
 
 Archaeologist Giles Hamm from La Trobe University in Melbourne led the excavations at the cave, finding what appear to be some of the oldest bone and quartz tools ever found in Australia, plus the earliest known use of the pigment ochre in the country’s history. 
 
 Artefacts that have been found so far include burnt eggshells, sharpened stone and bone tools, red ochre and gypsum pigments, and the team says this is evidence that these early technologies were developed locally. 
 
 "The old idea is that people might have come from the East, from the Levant, out of Africa, and these modern humans may have come with a package of innovative technologies," Hamm told Nicola Davis at The Guardian. 
 
 "But the development of these fine stone tools, the bone technology, we think that happened as a local innovation, due to a local cultural evolution." 
 
 That’s significant, adds one of the team, Gavin Prideaux from Flinders University in Adelaide, because it challenges certain assumptions that Indigenous Australians were not as innovative as similar populations elsewhere in on the globe. 
 
 "There is a Eurocentric view that material culture in Australia is quite simplistic and backward, but this helps rewrite that story," he told ABC News. 
 
 Until now, the oldest human tool found in Australia’s vast, arid interior has been a tiny axe fragment found earlier this year in the Carpenter's Gap rock-shelter of the Kimberley region of northwest Australia. 
 
 While the Carpenter’s Gap site is not far from the northwest coast of Australia - thought to be one of the earliest settled parts of Australia - the Warratyi rock-shelter sits more than 2,000 km from the early settlement of Lake Mungo in southeasten New South Wales, making it a much more difficult trek. 
 
 The tools have been dated based on a couple of estimates - quartz grains from the site have been dated to 44,000 years ago, but radiocarbon dating of the burnt eggshells, which are thought to be evidence of human cooking, revealed them to be between 45,000 and 49,000 years old. 
 
 The shells are thought to have come from emus and a large, extinct flightless bird from the Genyornis genus. Together with discovery of bones of a huge, extinct wombat-like species, Diprotodon optatum, this suggests that early humans were actually interacting with Australia’s legendary megafauna. 
 
 Diprotodon reconstruction. Credit: Dmitry Bogdanov/Wikimedia 
 
 This doesn’t necessarily mean they were hunting them, but they were at least living in close enough quarters that they could find bones and eggs and bring them back to the cave. 
 
 "One good thing about this study ... is there's no doubt there are megafauna remains in the form of Diprotodon and a giant bird in that rock shelter in a well-dated, well-stratified context sometime between 45,000 and 50,000 years ago," Prideaux told the ABC. 
 
 "The only way those bones and shells got there is because people brought them there ... in terms of megafauna that's the really significant finding." 
 
 The find is, of course, controversial, because that tiny axe fragment we mentioned earlier has been dated to around the same time period - 44,000 to 49,000 years ago. The problem is these estimates are all fairly rough, and still up for interpretation - Hamm's team, for example, insists that the axe is no more than 48,000 years old. 
 
 "[E]veryone is keen to make their site sound older," Sue O'Connor from the Australian National University, who was not involved in either find, told Marcus Strom at The Sydney Morning Herald. But she did add that "the Hamm discovery was likely older". 
 
 "The methodology of this study is as good as it gets," she said. "It's a very important site and a really significant find." 
 
 Debate will likely rage among archaeologists for some time, but the most important thing is that we're finally seeing real evidence of just how widespread the Indigenous Australians were within just 1,000 years of hitting the coast. 
 
 The study has been published in Nature. ||||| An illustration of a giant flightless bird known as Genyornis newtoni, surprised on her nest by a 1 ton, predatory lizard named Megalania prisca in Australia roughly 50,000 thousand years ago. . Credit: Peter Trusler, Monash University The first direct evidence that humans played a substantial role in the extinction of the huge, wondrous beasts inhabiting Australia some 50,000 years ago—in this case a 500-pound bird—has been discovered by a University of Colorado Boulder-led team. 
 
 The flightless bird, known as Genyornis newtoni, was nearly 7 feet tall and appears to have lived in much of Australia prior to the establishment of humans on the continent 50,000 years ago, said CU-Boulder Professor Gifford Miller. The evidence consists of diagnostic burn patterns on Genyornis eggshell fragments that indicate humans were collecting and cooking its eggs, thereby reducing the birds' reproductive success. 
 
 "We consider this the first and only secure evidence that humans were directly preying on now-extinct Australian megafauna," said Miller, associate director of CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. "We have documented these characteristically burned Genyornis eggshells at more than 200 sites across the continent." 
 
 A paper on the subject appears online Jan. 29, in Nature Communications. 
 
 In analyzing unburned Genyornis eggshells from more than 2,000 localities across Australia, primarily from sand dunes where the ancient birds nested, several dating methods helped researchers determine that none were younger than about 45,000 years old. Burned eggshell fragments from more than 200 of those sites, some only partially blackened, suggest pieces were exposed to a wide range of temperatures, said Miller, a professor in CU-Boulder's Department of Geological Sciences. 
 
 Optically stimulated luminescence dating, a method used to determine when quartz grains enclosing the eggshells were last exposed to sunlight, limits the time range of burned Genyornis eggshell to between 54,000 and 44,000 years ago. Radiocarbon dating indicated the burnt eggshell was no younger than about 47,000 years old. 
 
 The blackened fragments were likely burned in transient, human fires—presumably to cook the eggs—rather than in wildfires, he said. 
 
 Amino acids—the building blocks of proteins -decompose in a predictable fashion inside eggshells over time. In eggshell fragments burned at one end but not the other, there is a tell-tale "gradient" from total amino acid decomposition to minimal amino acid decomposition, he said. Such a gradient could only be produced by a localized heat source, likely an ember, and not from the sustained high heat produced regularly by wildfires on the continent both in the distant past and today. 
 
 Miller also said the researchers found many of the burnt Genyornis eggshell fragments in tight clusters less than 10 feet in diameter, with no other eggshell fragments nearby. Some individual fragments from the same clusters had heat gradient differences of nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, conditions virtually impossible to reproduce with natural wildfires there, he said. 
 
 "We can't come up with a scenario that a wildfire could produce those tremendous gradients in heat," Miller said. "We instead argue that the conditions are consistent with early humans harvesting Genyornis eggs, cooking them over fires, and then randomly discarding the eggshell fragments in and around their cooking fires." 
 
 Another line of evidence for early human predation on Genyornis eggs is the presence of ancient, burned eggshells of emus—flightless birds weighing only about 100 pounds and which still exist in Australia today—in the sand dunes. Emu eggshells exhibiting burn patterns similar to Genyornis eggshells first appear on the landscape about 50,000 years ago, signaling they most likely were scorched after humans arrived in Australia, and are found fairly consistently to modern times, Miller said. 
 
 The Genyornis eggs are thought to have been roughly the size of a cantaloupe and weighed about 3.5 pounds, Miller said. 
 
 Genyornis roamed the Australian outback with an astonishing menagerie of other now-extinct megafauna that included a 1,000-pound kangaroo, a 2-ton wombat, a 25-foot-long-lizard, a 300-pound marsupial lion and a Volkswagen-sized tortoise. More than 85 percent of Australia's mammals, birds and reptiles weighing over 100 pounds went extinct shortly after the arrival of the first humans. 
 
 The demise of the ancient megafauna in Australia (and on other continents, including North America) has been hotly debated for more than a century, swaying between human predation, climate change and a combination of both, said Miller. While some still hold fast to the climate change scenario—specifically the continental drying in Australia from about 60,000 to 40,000 years ago—neither the rate nor magnitude of that change was as severe as earlier climate shifts in Australia during the Pleistocene epoch, which lacked the punch required to knock off the megafauna, said Miller. 
 
 Miller and others suspect Australia's first inhabitants traveled to the northern coast of the continent on rafts launched from Indonesian islands several hundred miles away. "We will never know the exact time window humans arrived on the continent," he said. "But there is reliable evidence they were widely dispersed across the continent before 47,000 years ago." 
 
 Evidence of Australia megafauna hunting is very difficult to find, in part because the megafauna there are so much older than New World megafauna and in part because fossil bones are easily destroyed by the chemistry of Australian soils. said Miller. 
 
 "In the Americas, early human predation on the giant animals in clear—stone spear heads are found embedded in mammoth bones, for example," said Miller. "The lack of clear evidence regarding human predation on the Australia megafauna had, until now, been used to suggest no human-megafauna interactions occurred, despite evidence that most of the giant animals still roamed Australia when humans colonized the continent." 
 
 Explore further: A case of mistaken identity for Australia's extinct big bird 
 
 More information: Frédérik Saltré et al. Climate change not to blame for late Quaternary megafauna extinctions in Australia, Nature Communications (2016). DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10511
– "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," archaeologist Giles Hamm tells ABC News. Hamm was surveying a section of Australia's Flinders Ranges when his partner, aboriginal elder Clifford Coulthard, had to go to the bathroom. "Nature called and Cliff walked up this creek bed into this gorge and found this amazing spring surrounded by rock art," Hamm says. At the time, Hamm thought the newly discovered human settlement, a site called Warratyi, was only 5,000 years old. It turns out it's closer to 49,000 years old, and that has huge ramifications for our knowledge of ancient Australian civilization, Sky News reports. Hamm and his team published a study on Warratyi this week in Nature. The discovery of Warratyi in the arid interior of the continent means humans either arrived in Australia up to 10,000 years earlier than previously believed—or they expanded across the continent at a much quicker rate, Science Alert reports. Researchers at the site found 4,300 objects, including tools, and 200 bone fragments from multiple animals, including a 5,500-pound marsupial. The bones help explain how early Australians interacted with megafauna, including hunting them. The tools show Australians were using bone and stone axes earlier than believed and are evidence that early Australians developed some technologies on their own rather than adopting them from other peoples as previously believed. (Ninety rocks in Australia could rank up there with Stonehenge.)