Ancient Mystery Unveiled: Humans May Have Roamed Australia 55,000 Years Sooner Than We Believed
With his esteemed track record, Bowler may have now revolutionized the timeline of civilization in Australia for good.
Published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria journal, his study essentially posited that the stones at Moyjil (or Point Ritchie) by the Hopkins River in Warrnambool were blackened by man-made fires instead of brush fires. The research also suggested that the scattered remains of edible shellfish discovered in the area were strong evidence of early human activity.
John SherwoodA combination of shells and fractured, blackened stones at Point Ritchie in southern Victoria, Australia.
Together with David Price from the University of Wollongong, John Sherwood from Deakin University, and Stephen Carey from Federation University, Ballarat, the abstract of the six-paper study — titled “The Moyjil Site, South-West Victoria, Australia: Fire And Environment In A 120,000-Year Coastal Midden – Nature or People” — explains the central thesis quite succinctly:
“Thermal luminescence analyses of blackened stones provide ages in the…range…100-130 ka (thousands of years), consistent with independent stratigraphic evidence and contemporaneous with the age of the surface in which they lie.
The distribution of fire-darkened stones is inconsistent with wildfire effects. Two hearth-like features closely associated with the disconformity provide further indication of potential human agency. The data are consistent with the suggestion of human presence at Warrnambool during the last Interglacial.”
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