Parramatta River, Sydney: Human Settlement May Go Back 30,000 Years

Interesting story from Sydney, where archaeologists working on what was initially believed to be a 5,000 year-old Australian Aborigine site, dug a little deeper, and found what may be evidence of human activity going back more than 30,000 years...

"... the most extraordinary discovery was charcoal, possibly from ancient campfires, found about a metre beneath the surface, and very close to some artefacts. Radiocarbon dating showed that the tiny fragments, with a total volume equalling "about 10 pinheads" were 30,735 years old, give or take 400 years. Four other charcoal samples, recovered from shallower depths, gave increasingly younger ages, with the uppermost dated at 3270 years, plus or minus 35 years.

The age pattern suggested Aborigines had been routinely camping on the site for at least 300 centuries. "It's proof of the perseverance of Aboriginal culture."

Last week there was a report from Israel, near Mount Carmel, detailing the site at Misliya Cave, which the discoverers believe was in use from 250,000 bp until 10,000 years ago, although in this case the archaeologists are proposing that modern tools found there were the product of anatomically modern humans. Assuming that the dating and analysis at both sites is correct, it's quite interesting to consider that there may have been even more sites that have seen human occupation, either continuous or continual, over so many thousands of years.

In the case of Sydney, it may be possible that an Aborigine cultural tradition could have lasted over that period of time, if it is accepted that an Upper Palaeolithic parietal painting tradition lasted for at least 20,000 years in Europe, suddenly ceasing at the end of the Magdalenian, for an unknown reason - in Europe this era has been ascribed term 'Azilian', signifying a perceived decline of an era, in which a degree of apparent artistic austerity has been discerned - I'm not aware of a similar break in the artistic traditions of Australia at that time. This from The Sydney Morning Herald...

"It is the oldest evidence yet found of humans occupying what is now metropolitan Sydney. Aboriginal burial sites at Lake Mungo, in south-western NSW, have been dated at 40,000 years, The archaeologist who led the dig, Jo McDonald, said the previous oldest evidence of human habitation around Sydney had been found in the Blue Mountains (14,700 years), at Kurnell (12,500), and near the old Tempe House on the Cooks River (10,700).

"We have always thought that humans arrived much earlier in Sydney, having made their way down the coast from northern Australia and moving inland up major rivers like the Hawkesbury and Parramatta rivers. But most of that earlier occupation evidence was drowned on the coastal plain when the sea level rose to its current height around 7000 years ago."

Although Australia itself wasn't buried under ice during the Würm Glacial, it is apparent that it was certainly affected by the rising sea-levels which followed, and other recent finds, particularly in Australia, America and Britain have suggested that archaeology of significant research value exists off-shore in areas that were on dry land prior to the Great Melt.