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Australia The Cradle Of Man
According to our "traditional" history of stone-age occupation the Aboriginals were the "first Australians" having arrived here from south-east Asia at least 50,000 years ago. However, throughout a lifetimes research, I have gathered more than enough evidence that we still know nothing about our ancient past and the identity of the actual first inhabitants of our continent.
Until 1960, very little archaeological work had been done. Scientists thought the Aboriginals had only lived in Australia for 10,000 years.
Then finds at Kenniff Cave, in southern Queensland, produced evidence of Aboriginal occupation dating from as recently as 5,000 years ago back to 19,000 years. This placed the Aboriginal arrival into the last ice-age.
In recent years archaeologists have made some amazing discoveries on the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Rock shelter occupation sites at Leura, Blackheath and Wentworth Falls have revealed artifacts 12,000, 14,700 and 22,000 years old respectively, while recently near the eastern escarpment of the Blue Mountains on the Nepean River further excavations gave evidence of occupation dating back 45,000 years.
This site along with another found recently at Warrambool {v}, 80,000 years old, is one of the oldest known Aboriginal sites in Australia. In 1967, at Kow Swamp, in northern Victoria, archaeologists found ancient burial sites between 15,000 to 9,000 years old. The skeletal remains unearthed display marked anatomical differences to those of modern Aboriginals.
The ancient Kow Swamp people were much more robust and heavily built, their skulls much thicker, larger and longer, with large, wide and very projecting facial structure quite different from those of modern Aboriginal.
They had huge cheek bones and big eyebrow ridges, receding foreheads, huge teeth and jaws. Further significant fossil man discoveries were made soon after at Lake Mungo in south-western New South Wales. A female skeleton excavated here and carbon dated to be 25,000 years old, displayed delicate modern features, more akin to those of modern humans.
At the time the skeleton was considered to be the oldest evidence of a modern human in the world. Then a few years later, 100 km away at Lake Nitchie, further fossil remains were found on the ancient shoreline.
The skeleton of a male of 187 cm height, and very similar to the Kow Swamp remains, was excavated from a burial site, as recent as 6500 years old. These discoveries demonstrate that two distinct races of people inhabited Australia at the same time, during the last ice-age. Scientists now tend to believe that these two races inter-bred to produce the modern Aboriginal.
Some anthropologists now believe the robust {Kow Swamp} race to be decendants of the Java Man {home erectus} of 500,000 years ago, while the smaller Lake Mungo race came to Australia from China, probably decendants of the Peking Man {Homo pekinensis} and later Java type, Wadjak Man.
Sea levels during the last ice-age were much lower that they are today, at least 100-130 metres. Tasmania was joined to the Australian mainland-as was New Guinea. At the time, stone-age people could have almost walked from Asia into Australia, but because of areas by up to 100 km of open sea in places, making crossing by boat necessary. This would make these people the earliest seafarers in the world.
The first inhabitants of our land shared it with some fantastic creatures, for instance the giant monitor lizard {megalania presca}, which grew up to 10 metres in length; Kangaroos up to 4 metres tall; the Diprotodon, a giant Wombat-like marsupial twice the size of a rhinoceros; and an Emu about 7 metres tall. They also had to adapt to Australia's harsh environment, forcing them to develop better tools and weapons; during which they also developed the oldest stone-age art in the world.
It is a fact that, while Europe were hunting game on the edge of the northern Europe ice flows, stone-age people were crossing into Tasmania, hunting, and inhabiting caves on the edge of the southern hemisphere ice sheet. In 1981, a Franklin River cave was excavated to reveal thousands of stone flakes and a quarter of a million burnt bone fragments, of animals cooked and eaten there between 14,000 and 20,000 years ago.
The inhabitants of this cave are today believed to have been the most southerly Homo Sapiens in the world, surviving in the harshest region of the Southern ice-age.
I maintain that certain fossil discoveries made by me over the years could help push the antiquity of man in Australia even further back into the ice-age to a time comparable to that of the old stone-age races of Java and China. Near Bathurst, in the central west of New South Wales, in the late 1960's during the course of field research into early Aboriginal occupation of the region, I came across upon ancient river bank layers forming part of an extinct ice-age course of the Macquarie River.
I found two fossil human skulls protruding from these sediments. Both fossils are actually endoctrinal casts of mudstone and display signs of considerable antiquity. While one skull, the larger of the two, resembles "Solo Man" skulls of Java, a late Java Man type, ancestral to modern Homo sapiens who lived at least 500,000 years ago, with a receding forehead but lacking the thick eyebrow ridges of more primitive races; the smaller skull {a juvenile} is more primitive in appearance, with thick eyebrow ridges and a recedding forehead.
It is reminiscent of the Wadjak Man skulls of Java, an offshoot of Java Man ancestral to the Aboriginals. Even allowing for distortion due to soil pressure during the fossilisation process, the skulls certainly fit the picture already formed; of a primitive forerunner to the Aboriginals living side by side with a more modern-type race. Both skulls are estimated to be anywhere up to 100,000 years old.
On the basis of these discoveries some years ago I dared to suggest to prehistorians that, at some period in the remote past, populations of Homo erectus entered Australia to produce an offshoot from which the first Homo Sapiens evolved, eventually spreading across Asia into Europe, where they are known as Cro-magnon man.
At a later period the first primitive ancestors of the Aboriginals arrived here from south-east Asia to gradually spread throughout the continent, either killing off and/or inter-breeding with the early arrivals. At the time my theory was ridiculed. But recent discoveries are beginning to prove me correct.
That the first Homo sapiens evolved in Australia is not as fantastic as it may sound. Geneticists studying Aboriginal genes now suggest that modern man may have indeed originated in Australia to migrate out across the world 40,000 years ago.
Aboriginal traditions include references to a white-skinned race which inhabited Australia before them. They also know of a race of giants. During the 1960's I uncovered a culture of giant-sized stone implements in the New South Wales central west. They included hand-axes, clubs, knives, adzes and other tools ranging in weights of from 5 and a half kilograms to 16 and a half kilograms. Such huge "Megatools" could only have been made and used by beings of immense stature and strength.
These implements are reminiscent of others found in Java, where Meganthropus, the "giant Java Man", lived during the last ice-age at least 500,00 years ago, whose huge fossil jaws and teeth suggest creatures of immense weight, who stood up to three times the height of modern man.
Did Meganthropus or a close relative of him once roam Australia? Giant-sized man-like fossil footprints, preserved in mudstone, have turned up all over Australia. They include examples found near Kempsey in northern New South Wales up to 50 cm in length by 37 cm width across the toes; and as much as 60 cm length by 25 cm or more in width.
During field studies in northern Tasmania I found another fossil man-like footprint of 40 cm length in solid sandstone near a Bass Strait beach, where the creature must have wandered across a former land-bridge.
Just how long ago these giant beings inhabited Australia is arguable, but the fact that most of the preserved tracks were once covered by flowing volcanic ash indicates that these monster ape-men must have lived here when the smaller relative, Homo erectus, inhabited Java, as most of the tracks were preserved by volcanic eruption which occured in Australia perhaps 500,000 or more years ago.
That primitive Java-type races were present in Australia 500,000 years ago must naturally seem absurd to anyone brought up on the idea that no-one existed in Australia before the Aboriginals. Yet in the light of recent scientific findings it is obvious that this view is out of date.
It is now evident that not only have the Aboriginals been present here much longer than was once thought possible, but that they were preceded here by an earlier form of modern man later to spread out from Australia in Asia, thence across Europe, where he was to become known as Cro-magnon Man, the "father" of civilisation.
There can therefore no longer be no doubt that Australia was indeed the "cradle" of civilisation.
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