This 17,500-year-old kangaroo in the Kimberley is Australia’s oldest Aboriginal rock painting

Damien Finch, Author provided

Damien Finch, The University of Melbourne; Andrew Gleadow, The University of Melbourne; Janet Hergt, The University of Melbourne, and Sven Ouzman, University of Western Australia

In Western Australia’s northeast Kimberley region, on Balanggarra Country, a two-metre-long painting of a kangaroo spans the sloping ceiling of a rock shelter above the Drysdale River.

In a paper published today in Nature Human Behaviour, we date the artwork as being between 17,500 and 17,100 years old — making it Australia’s oldest known in-situ rock painting.

We used a pioneering radiocarbon dating technique on 27 mud wasp nests underlying and overlying 16 different paintings from 8 rock shelters. We found paintings of this style were produced between 17,000 and 13,000 years ago.

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Our work is part of Australia’s largest rock art dating initiative. The project is based in the Kimberley, one of the world’s premier rock art regions. Here, rock shelters have preserved galleries of paintings, often with generations of younger artwork painted over older work.

By studying the stylistic features of the paintings and the order in which they were painted when they overlap, a stylistic sequence has been developed by earlier researchers based on observations at thousands of Kimberley rock art sites.

They identified five main stylistic periods, of which the most recent is the familiar Wanjina period.

Styles in rock art

The oldest style, which includes the kangaroo painting we recently dated, often features life-sized animals in outline form, infilled with irregular dashes. Paintings in this style are said to belong to the “Naturalistic” stylistic period.

The ochre used is an iron oxide in a red-mulberry colour. Unfortunately, no current scientific dating method can determine when this paint was applied to the rock surface.

A different approach is to date fossilised insect nests or mineral accretions on the rock surfaces that happen to be overlying or underlying rock art pigment. These dates provide a maximum (underlying) or minimum (overlying) age range for the painting.

Our dating suggests the main period for Naturalistic paintings in the Kimberley spanned from at least 17,000 to 13,000 years ago.

The oldest known Australian rock painting

Very rarely, we’ll find mud wasp nests both overlying and underlying a single painting. This was the case with the painting of the kangaroo, made on the low ceiling of a well-protected Drysdale River rock shelter.

We were able to date three wasp nests underlying the painting and three nests built on top of it. With these ages, we determined confidently the painting is between 17,500 and 17,100 years old; most likely close to 17,300 years old.

The 17,300 year old painting of a two-metre long kangaroo can be found on the ceiling of a Kimberley rock shelter.
Damien Finch. Illustration by Pauline Heaney

Our quantitative ages support the proposed stylistic sequence that suggests the oldest Naturalistic style was followed by the Gwion style. This style featured paintings of decorated human figures, often with headdresses and holding boomerangs.

From animals and plants to people

Research we published last year shows Gwion paintings flourished about 12,000 years ago — some 1,000-5,000 years after the Naturalistic period.

This map of the Kimberley region in Western Australia shows the coastline at three distinct points in time: today, 12,000 years ago (the Gwion period) and 17,300 years ago (the earlier end of the known Naturalistic period).
Illustration by Pauline Heaney, Damien Finch

With these dates, we can also partially reconstruct the environment in which the artists lived 600 generations ago. For example, much of the Naturalistic period coincided with the end of the last ice age when the environment was cooler and drier than now.

During the Naturalistic period, 17,000 years ago, sea levels were a staggering 106 metres below today’s and the Kimberley coastline was about 300 kilometres further away, more than half the distance to Timor.

Aboriginal artists at this time often chose to depict kangaroos, fish, birds, reptiles, echidnas and plants (particularly yams). As the climate warmed, ice caps melted, the monsoon was re-established, rainfall increased and sea levels rose, sometimes rapidly.

Traditional Owner Ian Waina inspecting a painting of a kangaroo that we now know is more than 12,700 years old, based on the age of overlying mud wasp nests. INSET: an artist’s recreation of the in-situ rock painting.
Photo by Peter Veth / Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation. Illustration by Pauline Heaney.

By the Gwion period around 12,000 years ago, sea levels had risen to 55m below today’s. This would undoubtedly have prompted long-term adjustment to territories and social relations.

This is when Aboriginal painters depicted highly decorated human figures, bearing a striking resemblance to early 20th-century photographs of Aboriginal ceremonial dress. While plants and animals were still painted, human figures were clearly the most popular subject.

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Reaching into the past

While we now have age estimates for more paintings than ever before, more work is continuing to find out, more accurately, when each art period began and ended.

For example, one minimum age on a Gwion painting suggests it may be more than 16,000 years old. If so, Gwion art would have overlapped with the Naturalistic period but further dates are required to be more certain.

Moreover, it’s highly unlikely the oldest known Naturalistic painting we dated is the oldest surviving one. Future research will almost certainly locate even older works.

For now, however, the 17,300-year-old kangaroo is a sight to marvel at.

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Acknowledgements: we would like to thank the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, the Australian National Science and Technology Organisation, Rock Art Australia and Dunkeld Pastoral Co for their collaboration on this work.

Damien Finch, Postdoctoral Researcher, The University of Melbourne; Andrew Gleadow, Emeritus Professor, The University of Melbourne; Janet Hergt, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, The University of Melbourne, and Sven Ouzman, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology and Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The World’s Oldest Shipwrecks

World’s oldest tattooist’s toolkit found in Tonga contains implements made of human bone

The tattoo tools from Tonga (left to right) made from bird, human, bird and human bone respectively.
Author provided

Michelle Langley, Griffith University and Geoffrey Clark, Australian National University

Four small artefacts found on the island of Tongatapu, Tonga are among the earliest tattooing equipment known. Two have been found to be made from human bone.

Since their original discovery in 1963, the Tongatapu artefacts have been in storage at the Australian National University awaiting further examination.
In 2016, we took the first really good look at these artefacts using the modern methods and techniques now available to archaeologists.

Through directly dating a sample from one of the combs (the blades that drove the ink into the dermis layer of skin), we determined that the four artefacts were 2,700-years-old – much older than originally thought.

Careful examination also discovered that while two of the combs were made of sea bird bone (such as albatross), the other two were made from the bones of a large land mammal – probably human.

Why human bone? No large mammals were present on Tonga apart from people at that time and early burials from the Pacific show that bones were often taken from burials. We also know that human bone was a favoured material used to make tattooing combs in more recent times.

Ink staining on one of the human bone combs.
Author provided

Tattoo combs made from human bone could mean that people were permanently marked by tools made from the bones of their relatives – a way of combining memory and identity in their artwork.

Originally found alongside the combs was a small pot likely containing tattooing ink. Together, these artefacts made up a tattoist’s toolkit – something exceedingly rare in the archaeological record – and the oldest set of its kind found.

Evidence rarely survives

There is little evidence for early tattooing because tattooed human skin rarely survives intact enough for us to be able to see an inked design.

Thus far, the earliest evidence for tattooing reaches back to 5,300 years – the oldest known case being two ancient Egyptian mummies with small motifs inked into their upper arms.

Other early examples include the famous “Ice man” of the Italian Alps and the Siberian “princess” found with extraordinarily complex designs across her body.

The discovery of implements used in tattooing is even rarer. This is because identifying tools used to ink one’s skin is exceptionally difficult – any sharp object could potentially be utilised. Also, the kind of evidence needed to positively identify a tattooing blade (such as ink) often doesn’t survive.

The oldest surviving tattooing tools found so far are sharp flakes made of obsidian (volcanic glass) used 3,500 years ago in New Guinea for piercing or puncturing the skin, and in Egypt, single metal or stone points that might be tattooing equipment dating back to 3,200 BC.

In Oceania, we don’t have mummies to help us figure out when tattooing first appeared because skin doesn’t survive our harsh tropical conditions. So, instead we must look for less direct clues – such as tools.

Technology still used today

While the Tongatapu bone combs are younger than the metal and stone points previously found, they are part of a far more complex technology – one which is still used in present day traditional tattooing.

In the Pacific, tattooing has a long history. The unique and powerful designs made an impact on early European explorers to the region, and the return of tattooed sailors, beachcombers, and Indigenous peoples to Europe created lasting interest in the practice.

Ultimately, it was this contact between European and Pacific cultures that led to the vibrant modern tattooing traditions and the spread of Polynesian inspired tattoos all over the world today. (Ironically, in the 19th century missionaries suppressed tattooing in parts of the Pacific and in Tonga itself, people had to travel to Samoa to be tattooed.)

Hear about the importance of tattooing in the Pacific from those using tools near identical to the Tongatapu artefacts.

Despite the importance of tattooing to past and current Pacific peoples, we don’t actually know if it was something that arrived with the first human colonists to the islands around 3,500 years ago – or if it was invented at some point afterwards.

With this discovery, however, we now know that the complex inline tattooing combs were already present in Tonga almost 3,000 years ago and that they may very well have been invented there.

Michelle Langley, ARC DECRA Research Fellow, Griffith University and Geoffrey Clark, Associate professor, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The world’s oldest axe shows the cut and thrust of academia

Peter Hiscock, University of Sydney

The discovery of evidence of the world’s oldest axe is reported by my colleagues and I in a paper published in Australian Archaeology this week.

As often happens, this announcement was the result of a surprisingly long process, and yet it has shocked some archaeologists. The response to it reveals much about the nature of archaeological argument and about the way we think about the past.

The paper reported on an axe fragment found at a site in the Kimberley region in Western Australia. It wasn’t a case of the discovery being a single event, a sudden moment as the object was dug from the ground and revealed for what it was.

Instead, the “discovery” spans almost 20 years.

The story began in the 1990s, when my colleague Sue O’Connor – now Laureate Professor at ANU – excavated into the deposit. She uncovered a remarkably rich record of human activity spanning the last 50,000 years.

She retrieved thousands of artefacts and bones, and found impressively early evidence of painted art. But when she and her colleagues catalogued the artefacts, they did not recognise that one small specimen had polished surfaces.

In 2014, Sue and her PhD student, Tim Maloney, were relooking at the collection, and they spotted the polish on this object.

To archaeologists, this is like a neon light: it shouts that the object has an unusual history. As a specialist in ancient stone artefacts, I was brought into the investigation.

It was obvious on first view that this was a flake broken from the edge and a ground, or polished, axe. I have seen hundreds of similar archaeological specimens, and made them myself experimentally.

What was unusual about this one was its age. It came from the same level as a piece of charcoal that was dated to 44,000 to 49,000 years old. Thus, by association, we believe the axe fragment to be about the same age. Exciting stuff.

We knew that made this the oldest axe in the world!

A high bar

But how would we convince others of this discovery?

I set about making a detailed description of the specimen, while Tim Maloney provided me with measurements of other artefacts he had measured from the site.

I have four decades of experience, and it was really straightforward for me to describe this axe flake: it had the same edge angle as more recent Australian axes; it was made on the same material used for Australian axes; and it had the polished surfaces preserved with clear indications of the abrasion that created the edge of the axe from which it came.

Equipped with my description, we sat down and wrote a paper. We sent it off. It was sent back.

Some reviewers were not convinced the specimen was a piece of an axe. They wondered if the abrasion could have been natural and they said our photographs were not clear enough.

Disappointed, but not dismayed, the co-authors and I understood this was the job of a good reviewer; a high bar should, indeed, be set for such a significant discovery.

I corresponded with the journal editor and established what would be needed to make the case: a high resolution photograph and a demonstration that the smoothed surface must have come from an axe.

I took the piece to our new 3D digital microscope. It eventually gave me extraordinary photographs of the specimen and quantitative measurements of the roughness of the polished surfaces.

I compared the roughness indices to natural surfaces, to flaked surfaces and to the surfaces of Australian axes. I did experiments abrading the surfaces of Kimberley basalt. No surprise. The only match was the surface of other axes.

Take two

We re-submitted the paper. It was reviewed, again. We still got the same question: could the smoothness be the outer weathered surface of a cobble? The answer was no.

In fact, we had already explained in the paper how the smoothing process ground down the highpoints of other manufacturing surfaces, and so the axe was shaped all over and then ground. It couldn’t be a natural surface, and the reviewer had simply missed this point.

I don’t mind a high threshold of evidence, but I like reviewers to actually understand the paper.

But now, several reviewers began a second line of criticism. They said this was only one specimen, so how can we be sure it is real?

I am an experienced academic and I am used to the argy-bargy and politics of journal reviews, but how could I respond to this? Isn’t it to be expected that the first discovery of something will usually be a singular instance?

Of course, we would want this to be a repeatable observation, and no doubt it will be repeated as future archaeologists do further work. At heart I am a Popperian, and so I made the case to the editor that surely what counted was the quality of our demonstration that the specimen came from an axe, not the number of times an axe had been broken at the site.

I pointedly wrote to the editor saying that, if it were a more fashionable object – one pyramid, one statuette, or one hominid tooth instead of one axe fragment – it would be published to inform the discipline that it existed.

They corresponded with the reviewers, who merely suggested we go back and dig more. Going back to dig again would take years, hundreds or thousands of dollars and in the end may produce nothing. Because, perhaps, it was simply the only axe fragment in the site.

Our final approach to the editor of the journal Australian Archaeology met with a positive response. Yes, we only had one specimen, but we had demonstrated it must have come from an axe. There were no other production systems known in Australia that would create these features.

They accepted the paper.

Of course, it’s possible there might be some problem with our announcement revealed in the future. But on balance, the current evidence shows our conclusion is likely to be true, and surely that’s all we can ask for.

Be resilient

The announcement is significant. It reveals technological and cultural novelty and innovation in the anatomically modern humans dispersing from Africa, in the ancestors of Aboriginal people.

We have had a lot of press coverage today. Much of it good, much of it fair. And there have been some criticisms.

The BBC quoted American archaeologist, John Shea, saying:

The evidence is essentially one flake – one piece of stone out of hundreds and hundreds that they’ve excavated from this rock shelter site […] They would make a stronger case if they could show that similar chips with edge abrasion occurred at a greater number of sites.

Obviously, one pyramid isn’t enough for some people.

Young researchers reading this can take away the obvious message: while tough reviewing is a proper part of academia publishing, many reviewers’ comments may be way off the mark.

Be reflexive and self-critical, but you may also need to be resilient because dramatic discoveries can be challenging to academics and the public alike.

Peter Hiscock, Tom Austen Brown Professor of Australian Archaeology, University of Sydney

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

This guy found and restored the world’s oldest subway tunnel, and New York City took it back

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