DID humans live in Australia 60,000 years earlier than we thought? Newly discovered shells and blackened stones suggest so, according to James Bowler at the University of Melbourne.
In 1974, Bowler discovered the roughly 40,000-year-old Mungo Lady and Mungo Man, the oldest human remains ever found in Australia. Subsequent genetic evidence and human artefacts have since placed the arrival of humans in Australia at 60,000 years ago. But in six new papers, Bowler and his colleagues have described what they believe to be two hearth-like areas of blackened sand, charcoal and darkened stones in south-west Victoria, dating back to 120,000 years ago (Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, ).
Why do you think humans could be responsible for what you have discovered?
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There is an accumulation of shells of edible sea animals. Birds could be one explanation, but there is a big abalone and seabirds today don’t carry abalone shells around.
The dominant line of evidence is the extensive use of fire. We found lots of blackened stones, which originally started as pale limestone, and they are blackened as the result of intensive heat.
Could this have been caused by wildfires or lightning?
There are no plants there: no root channels and no remnants of any vegetation growing there. The burnt stones are lying on top of bare rock, which means the fuel for the fire had to be imported.
How do we know the site is 120,000 years old?
There are three lines of evidence, including geological evidence of sea level, all independently providing the same age. People will not argue about the age, they will argue about whether it is people or whether it is nature. There are no stone tools – though there are no hard rocks in that area suitable for making tools, so that’s not surprising. There are no bones and no human remains. It is a frustrating conclusion to 11 years of work, but I’m convinced that continuing research will find definitive evidence.
If the site is confirmed as ancient human activity, what does that tell us about our species’ history?
It opens up a can of worms for the understanding of when people came out of Africa. It is a long way from Africa to the southern coast of Australia. They would have had to cross water to get from Indonesia to the Australian mainland, but they wouldn’t have been the first to do that, because Homo erectus did that to get to the Indonesian island of Flores.
Is the hunt now on to find similarly ancient sites?
Undoubtedly. This evidence, circumstantial as it is, will inspire a lot of archaeologists to open their hearts and minds to that older level in the Australian landscape, which previously has been blocked out of any exploration because of our implicit understanding that nobody was here beyond 50,000 or 60,000 years ago.
In the past, people like myself – geologists, archaeologists – would never have looked at events at 120,000 years ago with any chance of finding human occupation. All that, I believe, has now changed.
