The humans that roamed Australia 50,000 years ago -

Tens of thousands of years ago humans set out on a voyage of exploration. Probably the first voyage of exploration in human history. The journey to Australia. We know it had to have been a voyage because Australia has been cut off from every other continent for the past 30 million years when it separated from Antarctica I believe. Antarctica must have been somewhere else too because I can't imagine kangaroos evolving in the snow. But this is why the wildlife is just so different out there. The prehistoric voyagers had to cross what we call the Wallace line. The line which separates the animals of Oceania from Asia. It's a kangaroo tiger divide. Kangaroos one side tigers the other. Now this area is split up into thousands of different islands but 50,000 years ago New Guinea, Australia and many many of the other islands were connected in this land mass we call Sahul. And this is exactly the time when the ancestors of modern aboriginals and Papuans reached their new homeland. There are sort of two routes that were possibly taken. We had a northern route through Sulawesi into New Guinea or a southern route through Java, Flores and Timor. Whichever route was taken these explorers had to battle really strong currents that were constantly trying to sweep them away back towards Antarctica. Incredibly at a site on Timor-Leste, East Timor, archaeologists may have unearthed one of these island hopping communities. On the sun bathed hills swarming the warm Lailea river archaeologists excavated a rock shelter called Laile Cave which contained deep deep sediments the perfect environment for preserving traces of prehistoric life. People seem to have suddenly started living here around 44,000 years ago. There isn't any evidence of human activity before those layers. In amongst the stone tools and the teeny tiny remains of ancient berries there is lots of evidence of these people being capable seafarers. The archaeological layers contain lots of remains of fish and not just river fish but marine animals like grouper and trevally. I mean other than the tiny island it's certain evidence that these people were were comfortable seafarers. These islands are not being reached by accident. I don't even think it's it's possible to accidentally colonize all of Australia. The ocean currents around there are extremely fast, extremely deep. You have to bring enough people to to start your new life. Had to have been at least a hundred people, couple of hundred people, something like that. This arrival of humans in Australia it really is kind of I think the first clear time that humans set sail for the horizon to start a new life. It's kind of the ultimate symbol of human tenacity and curiosity. I mean it's kind of the same impulse that sent us to the moon. I know it's different in a million ways in a million million ways but it's kind of that same impulse and yeah I can't wait to talk about the archaeological evidence we have for it. This has been a long time coming this video. Just need to take a second to thank Odoo for sponsoring this video. Odoo is an all-in-one management software that gives entrepreneurs the ability to manage their business from one spot. Invoicing, accounting, project management, inventory, website creation, much much more. Everything, everything you need to run a small business is there in Odoo. And get this, you pick the thing that you need the most, the app that you need the most, and that one's free for lifetime including hosting and support and all of that. And every other function that you need, all of them together, is just 19 euros 90 cents per month. That's cheap, that's a bargain. I use them to build a new website, it's so so easy. You give it a little information about what you want, choose a palette, add some pages, pick a theme, and boom. It literally generates your professional website in one minute. I'm not even joking, it's just one minute. Everything is customizable so let's say you want to add your social media page, you just drag and drop it. Like me, you've got some YouTube links, it's just a copy and paste job. Seconds, mere seconds, and your website looks great. So if you need a website or you're looking to simplify the whole digital side of your business, give Odoo a look. I guarantee it will save you time and money. And thank you to Odoo for sponsoring lots of educational content on YouTube. They're very cool and nice. At 44,000 years old, that site in Timor-Leste, Leila Cave, is probably after people arriving in Australia. Who knows, it may even have been people going back the other way, right? Who knows what happened there. But exactly when people arrived in Australia, in Sahul, in Papua New Guinea, is subject to a lot of debate. There are basically three kinds of evidence we can look at. The oldest human remains in Australia are from Lake Mungo in New South Wales. Here, three people were found. Definitely one burial, one cremation. I can't really find out what happened to the second person. It's the oldest cremation ever recovered archaeologically and dates to 26,000 years ago. But the burial dates to 40,000 years ago. It was a man, he was about 50 years old, he had arthritis, but he was buried next to the lake shore and covered in red ochre. I'm sure that was a fitting farewell for him. So for sure humans have been there 40,000 years because we literally have humans that are dated to 40,000 years old. And the site is quite far south too. You have to imagine humans were there at least a thousand years before that. It's right in the south of Australia. In terms of the the physical tools, things like that, archaeological remains, that's where things get a little bit more complicated. There are many sites across Australia dated between sort of 40,000 years old and some of them getting up to 48,000, 49,000 years old. But the oldest reported site is called Majed Bebe, way up in the north. Here in the shadow of this rock shelter, archaeologists found 104 grinding stones. Use where analysis shows that they were used for different things, mainly processing plants but also processing ochre perhaps and things like that. Such an important material, ochre, to ancient people just in terms of arts and things like that. They really loved it. There were even some stone tools that seem to have traveled quite far, like 25 kilometers. So humans are selecting nice rocks, they're bringing them in. It certainly seems to be a human site, but the dating is what's caused all the controversy. The oldest layer with artifacts came back as 68.7 to 50.4 thousand years ago I believe was the range of dates. The top end of that date range getting into 65 plus thousand years ago is what has caused all the controversy because it kind of contradicts our third line of evidence, DNA. So the people who voyaged across the ocean in that first voyage of exploration are of course the ancestors of modern Australian aboriginals and Papuans, and their DNA can tell us about the history of their people, or your people I should say if you're Papuan or Australian watching this, shout out to you. So all humans outside of Africa have this input of Neanderthal DNA, it's even in lesser amounts within Africa too, but definitely everyone outside of Africa has it. I've talked about it one billion times on this channel, there's lots of videos about it. I made a whole video about it recently even interviewing the geneticists, go check it out, I'll put it in the description. But the input of this DNA is believed to have happened around 50,000 years ago, if not more recently, maybe 47,000 years ago. Aboriginal Australians, Papuans, they have the same input from the same time, from the exact same period of admixture. We all descend from the same migration out of Africa. So if all of our ancestors were making love to a Neanderthal 50,000 years ago, could it really be that modern humans were in Australia 65,000 years ago? It's a tricky, tricky issue. One way to tie all of this together is if there was perhaps an earlier migration out of Africa that has left either no genetic legacy or a very small genetic legacy and then was replaced or absorbed by a much bigger migration 50,000 years ago. That's one way these two pieces of contradictory evidence could be aligned. But we don't have great evidence for that. There's some evidence that's heavily debated, but it's not a lot. A lot of the evidence seems to have human migration seems to happen around that 50,000 year mark. We have a lot of clear evidence for that. So it seems like some archaeologists are arguing that perhaps the older dates for Magic Baby are a mistake somewhat. Something is, we're missing some piece of the puzzle basically. Maybe even I've seen people argue termites are bringing old dirt up with them. Possible, possible. But it's really tricky because it's not just one genetic study that seems to suggest out of Africa happened around this 50,000 year mark. It's quite a lot of studies now that say the same thing. So who knows, right? Who knows? We've only known for 15 years that humans even admix with Neanderthals. So who knows what we'll find in 15, 20 years, right? It's honestly an incredible time in the world of archaeology and ancient DNA. So who knows? You've got to keep your mind open. But at the minute, the genetic evidence is hard to reconcile with the archaeology evidence. One amazing, astounding thing that genetics can show us though, is kind of how people migrated across Australia. So I came across this fascinating, fascinating study, which used the mitochondrial DNA from 111 modern Aboriginal folks from Hare, I believe. And they were seemingly able to untangle this migration across Australia 50,000 years ago, 45,000 years ago. I don't know how they do it. This ancient DNA, it's always like magic to me. But it seems like there's this split early on. Mitochondrial haplogroups O and R moved west along the coast and groups P, S and M moved east. And it seems these ancient Aboriginal folks circumnavigated Australia in just like a couple of thousand years. It's really remarkable, man. It's really remarkable. That's such a fast migration. Australia is so big. It always makes me wonder, like, why? What keeps pushing people in the Paleolithic to expand so far? You see it the same when people expand into the Arctic regions too. It's like, what is driving Paleolithic people to expand so much? Is it just something cultural within them at this time? Or is there something about being in a landscape where there's no other humans, right? Totally open landscape, no other humans. Do we just get like the wanderlust? Do we not stop roaming? I don't know. It's fascinating, isn't it? Because these are very small populations. They could probably live way closer together. But something keeps pushing them to explore, explore, explore. I'm telling you, it's the same. It's the same reason we went to the moon. The other thing this study found is that the DNA through time of these communities is very consistent. You know, to compare it to Europe and, like, the Bronze Age and stuff had big change in population. These kind of things seem to have happened less in Australia, really suggesting that some Aboriginal groups may have been on their land, on their country, for like 45,000 years. Tens of thousands of years, certainly. It's a pretty remarkable thing. Anyhow, Paleolithic Australia may have been empty of other humans, but the other creatures there, they're not messing around. They're not messing around. It's kind of terrifying from a modern perspective. Australian animals, they're some of the deadliest in the entire world. Maybe the deadliest. Giant saltwater crocodiles, blue-ringed octopus, inland taipans, Sydney funnel-web spiders. The list of creatures that can kill you is absurd. I don't actually know how anyone can live there. I'd just be so scared I'm going to put my shoes on, a spider's going to bite my little toe, and that's it for old Stefan. That's it. I put the wrong Shaun at the wrong time. Crazy. Crazy. I don't know how you do it, Aussies. Incredibly though, the animals of prehistoric Australia were even worse. Check these out. These are the vertebrae of a lizard, but not just any lizard. Megalania. Am I saying that right? Is it Megalania? Sounds like the name of a villain. Yes, Megalania. Megalania. So, it's a relative of the monitor lizard, which are terrifying in themselves, but they're like three, four, five times the size of a person. Estimates of their size vary, but like five meters long, 500 kilograms. It's entirely possible. These things were huge, huge beasts. So far, their remains have been found in Northern Australia, right where humans would have made land perhaps. Just imagine you hop off the canoe in your new place and one of these monsters comes marching up to you. Maybe this is the crew that ended up in Timor-Leste and they just ran into Megalania at the wrong time and thought, ah, we'll go back the other way. This is a bit much. Absolutely terrifying. The marsupials were just as bad. These are remains of Thylacoleo, aka the marsupial lion. Giant koala with a taste for flesh. They weren't related to koalas, but you know what I mean. They were marsupials. These were the apex predators of prehistoric Australia. They were basically getting towards the size of a lion. They're estimated to weigh about 130 kilograms. Modern male lion weighs 190-ish kilograms. So these are big animals. They're almost the size of a lion. They're bigger than you, and they're hungry for you. Even dinosaurs kind of made a comeback, honestly. This bird fossil in this picture is of an animal called Geniornis. This is apparently the last member of the Dromornithidae family, who have the nickname Demon Ducks, which is telling. Which is telling, isn't it, when you're given the name Demon Ducks? They stood over two meters tall, and if their surviving cousins like emus were anything to go by, I bet they were absolutely rapid. You can so easily picture the grasslands thundering to the sound of their feet as they're running around. This is just a small selection of the animals that roamed Australia at that time. There was even an upright-walking crocodile called Quincana. There was this animal Deprotodon. It was like a hippo-sized sort of wombat creature that migrated across Australia hundreds of kilometers, it seems their range was. Actually, sorry, I have to talk a little bit more about Deprotodon. I can't just dismiss it like that. There's this really interesting idea that Deprotodon is the originator for the mythical creature Bunyip. Bunyip lives in the swamps of Australia. Eats people. Terrible chap, as all mythological creatures are. There's an idea that maybe some ancient Australian animal like Deprotodon, hippo-sized animal, is the inspiration behind it. And I think that's entirely possible, even if it was a vegetarian. Big animals can be extremely dangerous. Hippos are extremely dangerous. Deprotodon could have been an absolute monster, not something to tangle with. Me personally, I think a lot of myths and things like that could either be inspired by prehistoric animals or humans finding the remains of prehistoric animals and not understanding what they are. It's entirely possible. It's entirely possible. You'll see later that oral history and tales and things like that in Australia, there's evidence that they have been passed down for tens of thousands of years. Deprotodon, it could be Bunyip. It could be Bunyip. It was a different world. It's kind of interesting how marsupials in Australia, they kind of filled all these different evolutionary niches that other mammals filled elsewhere. Like, convergent evolution is so interesting. Of course, now, all of these animals are extinct. And so the big question is, did humans play a role in that? Did we kill them all? What you are looking at on screen are fragments of an eggshell from that giant Geniornis bird. It was part of a study that analyzed ancient eggshells from 2,000 locations across Australia, which were being held in museums. There's something odd about these shells, though. They've been burnt. You can most clearly see it in these top ones. They've become totally black. All the burnt eggshells date to around 47.5 thousand years ago. Most of the eggs came from Western Australia, most of the samples. And of those, no burnt eggshells were found older than 50.5 thousand years ago. Exactly the time humans showed up. Seems like a big coincidence. However, you know, there's natural forest fires, right? The archaeological record is always incomplete. Who knows what we're missing, what we don't understand. So to double check their results, the team behind this paper also sampled emu eggs from same time periods. Also, none of the emu samples from Western Australia older than 55,000 years ago show any sign of burning. Quite a large coincidence, if you ask me. It seems like the death of Geniornis and the arrival of humans are connected. But like, not in the way I imagined. You tend to imagine these big animals being hunted in some like dramatic prehistoric scene, right? You almost can't help but romanticize it. But when you're living out in the wilderness, as these people were, you know, the easy calories from a giant bird's egg, probably impossible to ignore. Like, maybe these birds just declined because we're just eating the eggs. They're just not reproducing. We don't even have to fight them. We can just scramble them up for breakfast. It seems hard to imagine that humans were not involved in the extinction of Geniornis. But this is a highly debated topic, though. One of the other pieces of evidence is that Australia was genuinely seeming to get more arid at the time. So you can find a paper that suggests that that might be responsible for the decline of these animals. But then you can read another paper that says animals are declining regardless of whether their region is getting more arid. So, you know, my own personal opinion is it's probably always a combination of both, right? The global temperature and climates, they fluctuate and they can cause stress on local populations. But if you take a global perspective on this thing, you know, we have the same debates in America at a different time, in Europe at a different time. It seems that a lot of big animals die within a couple of thousand years of humans showing up. That seems to be a pretty worldwide pattern. But then the flip side of that is like, how does the buffalo survive in America? How did kangaroos survive in Australia? You know, why do some survive and some die out if we're responsible, if we're just going on this insane hunting spree? That's a great question and it's a great question I cannot answer. Maybe, you know, thinking about geniunus eggs, maybe it's about gestational times or something like that, I wonder. Maybe there are certain animals that reproduce slowly that find it hard to compete with apes with pointy sticks. Another idea I have is that that perhaps predators suffer a lot. Like, you can't imagine humans happily living alongside megalania. We're not going to tolerate that, really. A five meter long giant lizard, you know, gobbling up our kids for breakfast. We're not going to tolerate living alongside such an animal. And, you know, when you think about human culture, we're so good at incentivizing, like, brave and dangerous behavior. You can easily imagine a scenario where culturally, you know, killing such an animal becomes like a test of manhood or something like that. We're very good at things like that, man. We're very good at incentivizing crazy behavior. Just look at Red Bull. There's perhaps one place you can go to get a last glimpse of one of these incredible creatures in their natural habitat, though. This is a panel of rock art from the Kimberley region of northwestern Australia, home of the Balangara people today. It's a massive region. It's almost twice the size of the UK and home to about 40,000 people, which just boggles the mind. It's so easy to forget when you look at, because of how our maps distort things, how big Australia is. It's a continent. It's truly a continent. Anyhow, back to the rock art. You can clearly see that there's a person fighting a large predator. It could be it's a thylacine or Tasmanian tiger. This animal roamed Australia until about 3,500 years ago when it became extinct. And I think the leading hypothesis is it became extinct because of the introduction of dogs, of the dingo around that same time, which perhaps just out-competed it. It's about a dog-sized animal too. Maybe they're just filling the same niche. And for some reason, the dingo thrived and the thylacine declined. But it did live on in Tasmania until the modern period. The last one died in 1936, I believe, which is why we have this incredible footage of them wandering around a zoo. Incredible and yet so sad because we know it's the last of its species and it's stuck in a concrete zoo. Yeah, it's a bummer. So it could be a thylacine in this rock art because they do share stripes. But the proportion of the animal doesn't seem to be like a thylacine. It's really, really big. It's bigger than the person. And it kind of has these very muscular forelimbs based on the size and the style of it. Some people wonder if this is actually the thylacolea. This is a painting of the extinct marsupial lion. It's impossible to say for sure, but it 100% could be right. European caves are filled with paintings of prehistoric animals, including ancient lions. Why not Australian caves? It's entirely possible as it's a thylacolea. It's just difficult to say for sure. But this region is full of certifiably ancient, ancient rock art. So these paintings from the same region, the Kimberley region, I think it's called Gwion or Gwion style art. Forgive me if I'm saying that incorrectly. Yeah, it's got that classic Australian look to it, right? There's something about how they stylize human-like figures, which is so interesting. It's extremely cool. It's so distinctive, right? You know when you see figures like that, you're in Australia, I think. These paintings have been dated to about 12,000 years ago, maybe even 17,000 years ago for some of them, which is just spectacular. And the science of how we know that, it's just so brilliant as well. I love it. So dating rock art is always tricky because there's no stratigraphy. And if they're made out of a ochre, you can't even radiocarbon date them like you could if it was charcoal. So it's a very tricky thing to do, date rock art. Except in this case, little tiny mud wasps made their homes above and below the artwork and their nests, because it's like organic, it's got the saliva of that wasp or something in it. It's an organic material. These can be radiocarbon dated. Obviously art underneath a wasp's nest must be older than the wasp's nest. Or if it's on top of a wasp's nest, it must be older than it, right? You can see it here in this paper, 12,000 year old Aboriginal rock art from the Kimberley region, Western Australia. It's just incredible the materials we can use to unravel the past. 12,000 years ago, 17,000 years ago, a wasp chose to make its home on a painting. And because of that, we can fill in a piece of our human story, human evolution, Paleolithic ancestors. It's crazy. It's truly crazy. The Kimberley region is also home to these really distinctive types of Australian art. You've probably seen it before. They're called the Wanjina, I think. Wanjina. They're sort of these enigmatic mouthless figures. According to the native people of the area, they represent rain spirits. Very, very cool. Very cool. And again, it's that such distinctive style of Australian art. And it's a very clear example of Australian art connecting to the super rich oral history they have going on down there. I'm sure you've heard of the concept of dream time. Quite a difficult concept to translate, I think. But I read this book by Munya Andrews. She's an Australian author from the Kimberley region too. Bahdi woman, apparently. And she describes it as a philosophy, a cosmology, a worldview, a way of life that explains how the world was created and our relationship to each other. This is a great book, by the way. If you're interested in Australian culture, Aboriginal culture, do check it out. I'll put a link in the description. I really enjoyed it. It's very accessible read. It's great. But yeah, so dream time encompasses a lot, right? And there are so many different variations of it because there are so many hundreds of Aboriginal groups, each with their own worldviews and philosophies and all of these things. But there are some shared concepts and shared ideas. The most famous one, perhaps, being the rainbow snake. It's the most sacred of ancestral creatures. It's so sacred that some Aboriginal groups have developed taboos around how you should treat snakes out of fear of offending or upsetting the rainbow snake. It's not exactly a god, but it could be a symbol of God, a representative of God, something like that, right? They're associated with healing and light. And yeah, it's just a very important figure in this dream time world. Stories of the serpent are really widespread across Australia. So the Walpiri people in the north, the snake is referred to as Wanayarra. It's called Walungwa by the Waramunga people. It's such a widespread story. Everyone has variations of similar stories that you can't help but think it's really old, right? It perhaps dates back to a time when these communities were much closer together, or maybe even that time when people first arrived, like some sort of founding story, founding mythology, founding philosophy that came with the first Australians. It could arguably be the oldest religious symbol in the entire world. Now, I know some of you will be skeptical of that claim, and typically, I'm right there with you. I do have some sort of default skepticism when it comes to the age of storytelling. Could it really be that a story can be passed down for so long? I'm typically someone that's so skeptical of this, but this is just a really interesting example I've heard from Australia that I can't get out of my mind. I actually dedicated a whole video to it like two years ago now, or a year and a half ago. So this is Lake Surprise in the Australian state of Victoria. It's part of an extinct volcano called Budge Bim. The local Gunditjmara people have a story about the origins of this volcano, about it erupting, basically. The volcano was the head, and I think in the story it's described as spitting teeth, lava, fire. But to be honest, I'm having trouble locating a copy of the story to read for myself. I'm only able to find references to it. But this is how the story goes, right? What's so fascinating is that this volcano erupted about 30,000 years ago. Is it just coincidence that people have a fire story about a volcano emerging from the ground? Or it seems more parsimonious to me, more likely to me, that perhaps this is truly a story of a volcano erupting. That it truly was passed down for 30,000 years. I'm skeptical of such claims when it comes to flood myths and stuff, because floods are very common, right? Very, very common. But a volcanic eruption is quite a unique thing, and it's very dateable. It's entirely possible stories about Budge Bim, and perhaps stories that are so widespread amongst people who live thousands of kilometers apart. Extremely, extremely ancient. Tens of thousands of years old. From the time when people first arrived in this new land, all the way down to now. Yeah, incredible to think about. Incredible to think about. Beautiful example of culture, tradition, and exploration. And that's where I end the video. Thank you for watching.