Peter Schouten / UNSW
Megafauna animals from the Mamute Cave, around 50,000 years ago
A distinctive cut in the fossilized bone of an ancient kangaroo was considered evidence of slaughter. A new study now concludes that this conclusion was wrong.
In a new study, the professor Mike Archerfrom the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and his colleagues re-examined the fossilized tibia of a kangaroo sthenurine giant, now extinct.
Found in Mammoth Cavein southwestern Australia, around the time of World War I, the bone was later regarded as solid proof that the Australian Aborigines Hunted Megafauna.
Archer participated in the 1980 study that concluded that a distinctive cut in the fossilized bone it was evidence of slaughter. But now he willingly admits that this original conclusion was wrong.
“As a scientist, it is not just my job, but my responsibility update the record when new evidence emerges“, says Archer in one from UNSW. “In 1980, we interpreted the cut as evidence of slaughter because this it was the best conclusion that we could remove with the tools available at the time.”
“Thanks to technological advances, we can now see that our original interpretation was wrong. When bones were analyzed starting in the 1960s, there was much debate about whether the First Peoples lived so compatible with prehistoric megafauna of Australia or if they were the cause of the extinction of these megafaunal animals”, details Archer.
“Many saw the incision in the bone as having been made by humans with tools — and which finally showed that the extinction of megafauna and the arrival of humans around 65,000 years ago it wasn’t a coincidence“, adds the researcher.
“For decades, the bone from the Mammoth Cave It was ‘irrefutable proof’ of the idea that Australia’s First Peoples hunted megafauna, but with that evidence now refuted, the debate over what caused the extinction of these giant animals is open againand the role of humans is less clear than ever”, he concludes.
The results of the study were presented in a published on Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
To reanalyze the same leg bone from sthenurine with the incision, Archer and colleagues used high-tech 3D scanning to observe the inside of the bone without damaging it.
They also used updated radiometric dating technology to try determine the true age of the bone and cutand, as well as detailed microscopic analysis of the cut surfaces.
Their analyzes revealed that the cut was made after the bone had dried and have developed shrinkage cracks — which means that it has probably already it was fossilized when the incision occurred.
Paleontologists also analyzed a fossil tooth “amulet”offered by a man from the Worora Nation at Mowanjum Mission to the archaeologist Kim Akermanwho worked in the 1960s with First Nations people in the Kimberley region, in northwest Australia.
The tooth belonged to a Zygomaturus trilobusa type of giant marsupial, distantly related to wombats, that was part of the Pleistocene megafauna of Australia.
Although the tooth was received in Kimberley, its characteristics and composition closely matched other fossils from Mammoth Cavein southwestern Western Australia.
“The presence of the tooth in Kimberley, far from its likely origin in Mammoth Cave, suggests that may have been transported by humans or traded across vast distances,” says Kenny Travouillonresearcher at the Western Australian Museum and co-author of the study.
“This implies a cultural appreciation or symbolic use of fossils long before European science did so. It could be said that the First Peoples may have been the first paleontologists on the continent — and possibly the world”, notes the researcher.
“We can conclude that the First Peoples were the first people in Australia to demonstrate interest and collecting fossilsprobably thousands of years before Europeans set foot on the continent”, conclude the researchers.
