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:
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