Amazing stuff!
"Researchers in partnership with the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation (GLaWAC) unearthed evidence of rituals dating back 12,000 years ago in caves in southeastern Australia.
The archaeological find ... is from the time that the last Ice Age ended. It reveals insights into the heritage, going back 500 generations, of one of the planet’s oldest living cultures. ..."
From the abstract:
"In societies without writing, ethnographically known rituals have rarely been tracked back archaeologically more than a few hundred years. At the invitation of GunaiKurnai Aboriginal Elders, we undertook archaeological excavations at Cloggs Cave in the foothills of the Australian Alps. In GunaiKurnai Country, caves were not used as residential places during the early colonial period (mid-nineteenth century CE), but as secluded retreats for the performance of rituals by Aboriginal medicine men and women known as ‘mulla-mullung’, as documented by ethnographers. Here we report the discovery of buried 11,000- and 12,000-year-old miniature fireplaces with protruding trimmed wooden artefacts made of Casuarina wood smeared with animal or human fat, matching the configuration and contents of GunaiKurnai ritual installations described in nineteenth-century ethnography. These findings represent 500 generations of cultural transmission of an ethnographically documented ritual practice that dates back to the end of the last ice age and that contains Australia’s oldest known wooden artefacts."
Archaeological evidence of an ethnographically documented Australian Aboriginal ritual dated to the last ice age (open access)
Fig. 1: GunaiKurnai Registered Aboriginal Party area in southeastern Australia, showing the location of Cloggs Cave.
Fig. 4: The three largest pieces of wood from the two miniature fireplaces at Cloggs Cave, showing details of the two trimmed sticks.
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