Barrow Island’s Cave Reveals Earliest Australians Lived on Coast 50,000 years ago

Archaeological deposits from a cave on Barrow Island, a large limestone continental island located 60 km off the Pilbara coast of Western Australia, reveal some of the oldest evidence for Aboriginal occupation of the continent. The discovery is reported in the online edition of the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

Barrow Island. Image credit: University of Western Australia.

Barrow Island. Image credit: University of Western Australia.

“The findings provided unique evidence for the early and successful adaptation of Aboriginal people to both coastal and desert landscapes of Australia,” said lead author Professor Peter Veth, from the University of Western Australia.

Located on the northwestern coast of Barrow Island, Boodie Cave is optimally positioned near the edge of the Australian continental shelf. For most periods of lower sea level this cave would have been within the foraging range of the Pleistocene coastline.

Barrow Island was connected to the mainland for the duration of Pleistocene and early Holocene, eventually becoming a super-island connected to the Montebello Islands by an isthmus. This was drowned and the islands became a far flung archipelago after the Ice Age.

“Boodie Cave was used predominately as a hunting shelter between about 50,000 and 30,000 years ago before becoming a residential base for family groups after 10,000 years ago,” Prof. Veth said.

“It was abandoned by about 7,000 years ago when rising sea levels finally cut it off from the mainland.”

“We know that the earliest Australians were seafarers as they came to Australia by boat. But until now we have known very little about these first coastal peoples,” said co-author Professor Sean Ulm, from James Cook University.

“This new discovery, with its extraordinary preservation of archaeological remains, gives us with a glimpse of the lives of the people who lived on the coast in the distant past.”

“The large cave on Barrow Island provided rich records of ancient artifacts, gathering and hunting of marine and arid animals, and environmental signatures which show the use of a now-drowned coastal desert landscape — if you like an Atlantis of the South,” Prof. Veth said.

The researchers studied the speleothems contained in the limestone caves on the island to reconstruct the climate history of the area.

“The stalactites provide us with a unique record of the changing climate,” said co-author Dr. Christa Placzek, from James Cook University.

“Over the period that people occupied the cave the climate cycled through periods of cold, that were similar to modern arid conditions, and periods that were wetter and more tropical than today.”

The earliest dates for occupation of Boodie Cave, based on results from four international dating laboratories, are between 51,100 and 46,200 years ago.

“This site contains cultural materials clearly associated with dates in the order of 50,000 years,” Prof. Veth said.

“This pushes back the age of occupation from the previous and more conservative limit of 47,000 years ago. Even older dates are entirely plausible.”

Prof. Veth said the location provided the longest sequence of dietary remains from any Australian site.

“The antiquity of this site coupled with its exceptionally well-preserved bone and shell is unknown from other sites in northern Australia,” said co-author Dr. Tiina Manne, from the University of Queensland.

“Most archaeological sites in the north do not have food remains as they just don’t survive in harsh, tropical conditions.”

“The animal remains from Barrow Island provided us with an incredible archive of local environmental change over a very long period of time, along with profound insights into how people adapted and responded to a new and ever-changing arid landscape.”

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Peter Veth et al. 2017. Early human occupation of a maritime desert, Barrow Island, North-West Australia. Quaternary Science Reviews 168: 19-29; doi: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2017.05.002

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