9,000-Year-Old Stone Houses Found On Australian Island

Archaeologists working on the Dampier Archipelago, just off the West Australian coast, have found evidence of stone houses dated to shortly after the last ice age, between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago – making them the oldest houses in Australia.

The Dampier Archipelago is a group of 42 islands, and on one of the islands, the team uncovered knee-high rock walls.

“Excavations on Rosemary Island, one of the outer islands, have uncovered evidence of one of the earliest known domestic structures in Australia, dated between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago,” said lead researcher Jo McDonald, from the University of Western Australia.

“This is an astounding find and has not only enormous scientific significance but will be of great benefit to Aboriginal communities in the area, enhancing their connections to their deep past and cultural heritage.”

The researchers suggest that the structures’ inhabitants used branches or other plant materials to make the roofs. The houses are also quite sophisticated, with multiple ‘rooms’.

“Inside the houses, you have separate areas – it could have been a sleeping area and a working area. There is evidence of people grinding seeds on the rock floors inside the houses as well as shell food remains,” McDonald told Paige Taylor from The Australian. 

“We don’t really know what they were used for as these types of structures were not used in the historic periods.”

This particular structure should help researchers to investigate how Aboriginal groups lived after the ice age – a time when sea levels rose 130 metres, at a rate of 1 metre every five to 10 years. This would have eventually cut the Archipelago islands off from the mainland.

“We assume they were a way of marking out social space for groups living close together as the sea level rose after the ice age, pushing groups inland into smaller territories,” says McDonald.

“While these people were hunter-gatherers, these structures suggest people were developing social strategies to be more sedentary, to cope with environmental change.”

The team discovered the houses back in 2022, but they have only recently been dated using shells of edible mangrove gastropods found inside.

Although the researchers haven’t yet published a paper, so we can’t get too excited until then, there should be more information released as the team find it, and they will hopefully publish a paper in the next few months.

Murujuga, which includes the islands and the nearby Burrup peninsula, are also hugely culturally important to the Aboriginal people in the area, and important for researchers trying to understand the past. A number of interest groups are pushing for Murujuga to become World Heritage listed.

“As well as containing more than one million rock engravings of great scientific and cultural significance, the Archipelago is home to one of the country’s largest industrial ports,” McDonald said in a statement today.

She says that research from the last 12 months indicates that there was a human occupation in the area dating back 21,000 years, even before the last ice age.

Just 100 km west, on Barrow Island, researchers have also found evidence of human occupation dating back 50,000 years. 

According to McDonald, although there are similar structures around Australia, the houses on Rosemary Island are the oldest found.

We hope this valuable area will be protected for many years to come. 

This Man Was Killed by Brutal Boomerang Blow 800 Years Ago

Since analyzing markings of an 800-year-old fossil, Australian anthropologists have found evidence that its owner has been killed in a vicious boomerang attack.

Boomerangs are popular hunting weapons used by the Aborigine and Torres Strait Islanders, however, the latest findings indicate they may still be used for warfare well in advance of the arrival of European settlers in Australia.

The findings give a rare insight into pre-colonial, intertribal disputes, which have, rather than archeological facts, been based on historical accounts for a long time.

“I don’t know if it was a continent-wide phenomenon, but we do see evidence in this part of [Australia] that … supports intertribal conflict,” team member Michael Westaway from Griffith University told Traci Watson at National Geographic.

The skeleton is thought to have belonged to a 20- to 30-year-old Aboriginal male, who locals have named Kaakutja (meaning “older brother” in Baakantji). It was discovered in 2014 in Toorale National Park in eastern Australia.

Looking at the long wound on the dead man’s skull, researchers originally thought he died from a sword strike by a member of the British Native Police – a task force responsible for the deaths of many Aboriginals in the 1800s.

Two years later, further analysis of the remains suggest that the man actually died in the 1200s – about 600 years before Europeans arrived.

After further investigation, the team found a nearby cave that contained Aboriginal paintings of warriors with shields, clubs, and boomerangs, reports Watson. They then compared the gash wound on the man’s skull to the average size of a boomerang, and showed that the two matched up.

Besides the gash, the man was also found have broken ribs and a partially severed arm, Bob Yirka reports for Phys.org, which suggests that he was a long-time fighter, who had survived many battles before his death.

During Kaakutja’s time, boomerangs were a commonly used for a number of tasks, such as digging, hunting, and – based on these findings – combat.

Contrary to the image of boomerang combat that most of us probably have in our minds – with two combatants standing far away from each other, lobbing boomerangs at range – the team says they were probably used for close combat, likely thrown around a shield, allowing warriors to smack guarded foes without revealing themselves.

While understanding how boomerangs were used as weapons is an important find in itself, the team says this is important evidence to suggest that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people used to fight intertribal conflicts before European colonisation.

“There are those who think [pre-colonial Australia] is the Garden of Eden, and those who say it’s a hostile place,” Jo McDonald from the University of Western Australia, who wasn’t involved in the study, told National Geographic. “The evidence here is that it’s kind of both.”

With further analysis of Kaakutja’s remains, the team hopes to find more clues about tribal relations in pre-colonial Australia.