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Guide to Patagonia's Monsters & Mysterious beings

I have written a book on this intriguing subject which has just been published.
In this blog I will post excerpts and other interesting texts on this fascinating subject.

Austin Whittall


Monday, October 7, 2019

Humans but not AMH in Australia 125,000 years ago?


My previous post mentioned the currently accepted window for the entry of humans into America, roughly some 15,000 years ago. A similar situation occurs with Australia: the peopling of the vast southern continent-island is tied to the purported "Out of Africa" dates meaning that nobody accepts an earlier entry date than roughly 50,000 years ago.


But there seems to be some evidence of early human activity in Australia. I will mention two of them.


Charcoal 120,000 years old at Moyjil


Fire is a good indication of human activity. Of course, natural events can also start fires. A paper published in 2018 (Ian J. McNiven et al., The Moyjil site, South-West Victoria, Australia: Excavation of a last Interglacial charcoal and burnt stone feature - Is it a Hearth?, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 130(2):94, January 2018, DOI: 10.1071/RS18008), looks into the charcoal found at a site in NSW, Australia.


I will highlight the paper's main points: "The oldest dates for human occupation of Sahul (Australia and New Guinea) based on radiocarbon dating are a little under 50 ka...
we present excavation results for a small deposit containing charcoal and darkened stones (some clearly burnt) at Moyjil...
The potential for Moyjil to re-write the early human history of Australia is not new, as claims have already been made that a marine shell deposit at the site dating to at least 60‒80,000 years ago (since redated to 120‒125,000 years old — see Sherwood et al. 2018a) could be cultural in origin (Sherwood et al. 1994; Nair & Sherwood 2007)...
On balance, the broad range of discrimination criteria marginally point more towards CBS1 representing a cultural hearth and not exclusively a naturally burnt feature. As such, some evidence exists for CBS1 representing a ~120,000 year old hearth. However, the evidence for CBS1 as a hearth must be definitive and irrefutable for such a substantial claim to be considered credible, given the significant implications that this would have for world history. At this juncture, CBS1 does not meet this high level evidential threshold.
".


So the evidence exists but as it isn't "irrefutable", for the time being it will not be considered as being the result of human activity.


For those interested on the shell midden deposit dated to 120-125 kya, the full text paper is here.


Lake Eyre Skull Fragment


The book The First Boat People by Steve Webb, Cambridge University Press, 2006, addresses the issue of an early peopling of Australia (you can read it online following the link above).


Webb provides plenty of evidence to back his ideas. I will just mention the skull fragment found at Lake Eyre, (pages 161 to 172) which was dated to an age of 121 - 162 kya via fluorine analysis and to 132 kya by uranium series method.


Webb states that these dates... "strongly suggests it lies well within the last interglacial, probably towards the middle (?80–100 ky). These results are, therefore,taken to indicate that humans were certainly in this region during the lastinterglacial and well before the onset of the last glaciation."


Which is what we mentioned in our post, yesterday. Dates of initial peopling of America could be from the Interglacial. And Webb finds that feasible for Australia too.


Webb summarizes the situation as follows: "Finally, we cannot ignore the fact that humans lived next door to Australia for nearly two million years before they arrived here. The fossil evidenceindicates that they constituted a viable population living at the edge of theinhabited world, in Java and China. Their viability stretches beyond theirfossil remains and into the realm of exploration as they explored beyond Java to Flores Island almost one million years ago, and that required a capability to cross at least two 22 km water gaps. The idea that this was an aberrant group and one that does not count in any assessment of regional human evolution is difficult to accept and, indeed, it does not take into consideration the will and determination of this erstwhile group of humans. Consider, if they made that inter-island crossing so long ago, what would have stopped them from continuing to the end of the archipelago and even further during the next 700 ky? These people or their descendants were the most obvious to be the first Australians, long before the 'advent' of anything called anatomically modern human. Why should we invoke a people from half way round the world to reach here first when this successful population thrived and explored their archipelago only a few hundred kilometres away from our continental shelf or little more than a hundred kilometres away during low sea levels? It isnot possible that this persistent and successful group did not attempt to enter Australia and eventually succeed in doing so. They may have done this out of pure curiosity, probably tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of years before anybody else came anywhere near their new homeland. For me, the question is not did they arrive here, it is when did they arrive here."


I fully agree with Dr. Webb.


The map below shows current continental shores (gray line), the ice age coastline (gray shade), the Homo erectus would have had to cross the same open stretches of water our Homo sapiens ancestors crossed, from Flores Island to Sahul:




Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall © 

2 comments:

  1. Very interesting. One should consider that Adam or at least the second Adam which is Noah ;survivor of the great flood which wiped out 99% of humans; originated in Sahul (Continent)/ Australia from where Noah's sons Shem, Ham and Japheth migrated to Eurasia, America and Africa.
    Later so-called AMH migrated out of East-Africa and mixed with their cousins (cousins offspring?) in Eurasia, Americas and eventually (probably?) about 5,000 years ago in Australia. This would make more sense why Australian Aborigines are (believed to be) the oldest continues Civilization in the World. - Urisahatu

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  2. The paper about the charcoal evidence at Moyjil site contains an unusually exhaustive treatment of all the facts involved, in which are discussed virtually all possible sources for equifinality (concept related to how phenomena of different nature can lead to the same, or similar final result), which is an imperative aspect to be taken into account in every serious archaeological work, though is not always objectively employed at the time of review or dissent in opinion about certain sites, …and therefore, can perfectly cause the worst headaches to the archaeologists who dare to propose new frontiers that are well beyond the optics of the orthodoxy…
    Moyjil site represents a not so well defined (although extremely suggestive) archaeological context, whose dating at 120 Ka is perhaps not less “provocative” for early peopling of Australia than that´s from Cerutti Mastodon (130 Ka) for first Americans.
    As you are inferring with the title of your post, an immigration into Australia at the Last Maximum Interglacial would seriously question the existing hypothesis based on the preconception that only H. sapiens could have been a feasible candidate for first peopling this apparently New World.
    It´s evident that the authors are dealing with all this facts with extreme caution, in the sense that there is no confirmatory tone at all in McNiven et al. paper…only there is an absolutely objective analysis, from which they tentatively infer, as their most feasible conclusion, the cultural character of this hearth, and also they leave room for further research on this subject, by means of other diagnostic methods.
    Though this findings strongly points to the existence of a real hearth, it´s indeed a pity that nothing more could be found on it or in its vicinity…because only a small piece of burnt bone, as well as a tiny flake of a thermoaltered lithic artifact, could have significantly upgraded the evidence on this site, up to the level of being very hardly questionable.
    As you point, evidence does exist, but is not enough.
    Assuming that, anyway, its highly probable that “someone” lit a fire there, in my opinion two tentative scenarios may be considered; a) These people didn´t left more than this at this site (hypothesis of a hearth used to cook only vegetables, or only to get warm…why not?..it would not be impossible for an ephemeral presence in that place), and/or b) The archaeological visibility of other signs/evidences is too low to detect them…After all, it´s about a 120 Ka context in an open environment (not a cave)… and additionally, it is inserted on a region whose population density at the time, could have been very much lower than that´s of similarly aged sites from Africa or Asia.

    I completely agree, too, with the essence of the paragraph you are reproducing from Steve Webb´s book. Given the presence of genus Homo remains at Mata Menge and neighboring sites in Flores Island (very near Australia), dated well beyond 700 ka,…the age for first peopling for this continent has virtually no “reasonable” lower limit, other than that would be imposed by the antiquity of these ancient sites from Sundaland.

    Very good post!!...and very good sources! …Webb´s book has a huge amount of interesting data for me. Thank you for sharing it.
    Best regards
    Marcelo



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