Hunters or gatherers? New evidence challenges claims that Australia’s first people wiped out large animals

Tens of thousands of years ago, Australia was still home to cryptic megafauna—large land animals such as giant marsupial wombats, flightless birds, and short-faced giant kangaroos known as stenorrhines.

Then they gradually disappeared. What killed them?

There has long been a strong debate about whether Australia’s first people were responsible for the extinction of Australia’s megafaunal animals, or whether climate change was the primary cause.

In other places, such as the Americas, Aotearoa, New Zealand and Madagascar, humans have been linked to such extinctions. This has led some researchers to believe that humans may also have driven Australia’s megafauna to extinction.

However, hard evidence for this is hard to find. With new methods, we have re-examined the fossil bones that apparently supported this idea in the 1970s, and have come to a new conclusion. Our results are published in Royal Society Open Science.

A longstanding debate

Humans appear to have first entered Australia during the Late Pleistocene, perhaps 65,000 years ago. At the same time, Australia was also experiencing a fluctuating climate.

So, when much of the local megafauna died out thousands of years ago, what factor was responsible? The debate depends on whether it is human activity or climate change, or perhaps something else entirely.

Australia has no “kill sites” or other incontrovertible hard evidence that people are killing and butchering native megafauna. This is in contrast to sites found in North America, such as the Headsmed in Buffalo Jump World Heritage Site in Canada, where people hunted large numbers of buffalo.

So, in Australia, researchers have focused on individual fossils instead. Over time, much of the scant evidence of human involvement in megafaunal extinctions has been dismissed. Only a few notable finds remain.

The first is a single incisor of a large marsupial, Diprotodon optatum. The tooth was found at Spring Creek, Victoria, where small bugs had been dug up by humans. Reprisal now suggests that Tiger Quilos is guilty.

A fragment of a juvenile Diprotodon bone from the Variete Sanctuary in South Australia’s Flyders range has also been presented as evidence of killing and butchery. However, a 2016 study argued that the markings on the bone may not correspond to human activity.

Fragments of eggshells found in several places in Australia Piece by piece.

Finally, a cut bone of an extinct stenorian kangaroo from Mammoth Cave in southwestern Western Australia has been suggested as evidence of human butchery. One of us, Mike Archer, co-authored this study in 1980.

Revisiting the past

With the technologies available in the 1970s, we attempted to investigate the same bone from Mammoth Cave in more detail. Closer analysis of the surface supported the original conclusion that the cut was indeed caused by human activity, and not by animals and falling rocks.

But a micro-CT scan revealed a surprise.

Internally, the bone has seven deep fissures running the length of the shaft. This is caused by taphonomic desiccation, a drying process that occurs long after the animal’s death.

While investigating the cut site, we found a distinct transverse crack at the base of the cut area. This was definitely caused by the pressure of the cutting process.

Importantly, the crack was shortened at both ends where it intersected the long cracks. This means that the bone was already removed when the cut was made.

In short. , the bone was not from a fresh corpse when it was cut. In all likelihood, it was already a fossil.

Fossil gifts

This raises an even more interesting question. Did the first people who dug this cut collect the bone because it was an interesting fossil rather than a source of nutrients?

This idea led us to analyze a sample that contained fossils that had been gifted by First Nation people. In the 1960s, Indigenous First Peoples in the Kimberley region of North Western Australia gave the late anthropologist Kim Ackerman a “fascinating” gift of teeth from a large extinct marsupial, Zygmatosaurus trilobus. He was also given a parcel of an emu feather along with teeth that came from an extinct stenorian kangaroo, Procoptodon braunorum.

The animal is known only from fossil deposits in South Australia, where the objects were gifted. When we analyzed the basic composition of the Z. trilobus tooth, we found that it likely came from Mammoth Cave, 2,000 km to the south.

Gatherers, not hunters

First Nation people in Australia have long collected and traded a variety of fossils such as trilobites, ammonites and mammal jaws.

This interest in fossils may be the best explanation for the cut in the bones found in Mammoth Cave, and the fact that fossilized teeth ended up in the Kimberley thousands of kilometers away.

This may also explain the Diprotodon optatum bone found in the Varity Shelter deposit in the Floridans range. A clear mass of this megafaunal species is exposed and available for collection at the surface of Lake Calabona, a relatively short distance from the refuge.

Gerard Croft and Ludwig Glauert are often cited as the first “Australian” specialists. We would argue that First Nations people beat them to the punch, possibly by thousands of years.

There is currently no hard evidence that megafaunal animals that became extinct in Australia were butchered by early humans in Australia. That’s not to say it didn’t happen. However, despite many investigations, we still have no proof that he did.

This article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.