We often hear that Aboriginal peoples have been in Australia for 65,000 years, “the oldest living cultures in the world”. But what does this mean, given all living peoples on Earth have an ancestry that goes back into the mists of time?
A sequence of 69 radiocarbon dates, including on wood filaments from the sticks, date one of the fireplaces to 11,000 years ago, and the deeper of the two to 12,000 years ago, at the very end of the last Ice Age. Two small twigs that once grew from the stick had been trimmed off, so the stem was now straight and smooth.
A second miniature fireplace slightly deeper down in the excavation also had a single branch emanating from it, this one with an angled-back end like on a throwing stick, and with five small twigs trimmed flush with the stem. It had keratin-like faunal tissue fragments on its surface; it too had come into contact with fat.