A recent analysis of two Australian fossils that are about 50,000 years old suggests that Australia’s First Nations valued large animals for their fossils and meat, collecting bones and transporting them long distances.
For decades, scientists have taken the notches on fossils as signs that indigenous Australians hunted large prey — perhaps to the point of extinction. When humans first arrived in Australia around 65,000 years ago, the continent was home to huge animals that are now long gone, such as giant long-nosed echidnas, short-faced kangaroos that were nearly 10 feet (3 meters) tall, and wombat-like tusks such as rhinoceroses. However, around 46,000 years ago, all these large animals became extinct.
In the 1960s, scientists discovered a human-made cut mark on the tibia of a fossilized kangaroo found between 1909 and 1915. Mammoth Cave in southwestern Australia. At the time the cut was discovered, scientists suggested that the mark proved that First Nations slaughtered ancient megafauna.
But scientists recently scanned the bone’s internal structure and came up with a new interpretation: the cut on the bone was made after the animal had long since died—perhaps after its remains had fossilized. The discovery would rule out slaughter, suggesting the prize was a preserved kangaroo bone, the researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
The second fossil the authors examined in the study, the proboscis of the extinct giant wombat Zygomaturus trilobus, provided another clue to the First Nations fossil collection. This marsupial species is common in fossil deposits in southern Australia, but unknown in the north. However, an aborigine in northern Australia kept the tooth as a charm, fixed in resin and attached to a string of human hair. (He gave the charm to an anthropologist in the late 1970s, but it was not known how long the native had the charm or where it originated.)
For the tooth to end up in the northern part of the country, “it seemed likely to us that it was collected as a fossil in southwestern Western Australia and then moved along the coast to the Kimberley region,” said Dr. Michael Archer, lead author of the new study and a professor and researcher at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
There is no evidence of “overkill”.
Mineral deposits cover a fossil bone (left) from excavations at Mammoth Cave. The late Lindsay Hatcher (right), co-author of the study, points out where the sample was taken. – John Woodhead
Together, the tooth and tibia tell the story of First Nations as fossil collectors, Archer told CNN in an email. They also cast doubt on the long-held hypothesis that First Nations hunted Australia’s megafauna to extinction, based on impressions on fossil bones that may have been made by collectors rather than hunters.
The findings show a lack of strong evidence to support the hypothesis that Australia’s First Nations “may have ‘overkilled’ these animals shortly after humans arrived on the continent,” he said. “In fact, the evidence suggests that humans and these megafaunal animals coexisted for at least (15,000) years, probably until climate change led to the gradual extinction of these animals.”
It was already known that First Nations used bones and shells as decoration or cultural objects, said archaeologist Dr. Judith Field, an emeritus associate professor at the University of New South Wales, who was not involved in the new research. Some examples include shell beads dating to more than 10,000 years ago from Barrow Island off the coast of Western Australia, and a roughly 7,000-year-old Tasmanian devil’s tooth necklace found near Lake Nichi, Field told CNN in an email.
“These findings correlate with what we know about human behavior,” Field added. “People collect things and move them into the landscape.
Furthermore, “There is only one place on the Australian continent where megafauna and humans are unambiguously placed in the same place at the same time: Cuddie Springs,” Field said. While humans have overlapped with some megafauna species, climate variability probably also contributed to the extinction of Australia’s largest animals, rather than human hunting alone, she added. The new study “adds another exciting dimension to our knowledge of the complexity of human behavior.”
Inside the bone
In the cross-sections of the mammoth cave tibia, the red arrows (a) indicate three longitudinal cracks. In the next cross-section, the white arrow (b) indicates a transverse crack. The two red lines in (c) indicate the approximate locations of the cross-sections. – Blake Dickson
in 1980 Archer collaborated on a paper where a cut mark is a sign that humans butchered an animal. But in 2013, when more sophisticated fossil analysis tools became available, Archer wondered if further study of the bone might reveal clues that had previously been overlooked.
Archer said he asked study co-author Dr. Blake Dickson, then a student at the University of New South Wales, to perform a microcomputer CT scan of the fossil “to see what the internal structure associated with this cut on the bone might reveal.” Microcomputer scanning allows scientists to look at fossils without damaging them.
“We were shocked then to see that the evidence clearly showed that the bone was not cut until after the bone had already become a fossil,” Archer said.
Numerous longitudinal cracks in the tibia indicated that it had desiccated prior to becoming part of the fossil, and the section contained a transverse fracture that occurred after the desiccation cracks formed.
“This was clearly in no way an indication that the animal had been killed and/or butchered by humans,” Archer said. “The cut was part of an effort to collect fossilized bone as a curiosity for First Nations people – they were fossil collectors, just like us!”
Tibia (a) from Mammoth Cave with cut (b) on shaft. – Anna Gillespie
The authors do not believe that First Nations did not hunt large animals. But the idea that they hunted the megafauna until they were gone likely came from Western bias, driven by centuries of post-colonization mass extinctions in Australia, Archer said. These extinctions were largely due to European agriculture and the introduction of non-native species that outcompeted Australian animals.
“These modern European-driven extinction events have led some scientists to naively believe that all peoples in the past similarly created the same chaos when they first entered new lands,” Archer said.
“We think that, at least in Australia, First Nations could have quickly become an integral part of the continent’s ecosystems by appreciating and sustainably using the continent’s native biota, rather than alien species associated with the unsustainable agricultural practices we now do on the continent.”
Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American, and How It Works magazines. She is the author of Rise of the Zombie Bug: The Surprising Science of Parasitic Mind Control (Hopkins Press).
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