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Madjedbebe
Deep-time occupation and the archaeology that dates it. The Madjedbebe rockshelter in the Northern Territory, Lake Mungo, ground-edge axes, grindstones and the excavation trenches themselves. The 65,000-year date published in Nature is genuinely contested on grounds of sediment movement, and the archive says so rather than settling it.
Part of Australia
60 moments in this segment.
- - Owen's plate of Diprotodon australis. An illustration from Richard Owen's paper on the fossil mammals of Australia, published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1870. Owen worked entirely from specimens shipped to London and never visited Australia. His naming of the megafauna established the framework that later Australian palaeontologists worked within and against.
- - Carvings at N'Dhala Gorge. A pecked engraving on rock at N'Dhala Gorge east of Alice Springs, photographed on a Kodachrome slide in 1987. The gorge holds several thousand engravings in a narrow valley. It lies on Eastern Arrernte Country.
- - Rock art at Ubirr. Painted figures on the shelter wall at Ubirr in Kakadu, photographed in 2004. Paintings here span the change from an inland dry landscape to the freshwater wetlands that formed after the sea rose, and fish appear in the later layers. Dating individual paintings is far harder than dating the sediment beneath them.
- - Thylacoleo in the Victoria Fossil Cave. A second view of the marsupial lion skeleton mounted in the Naracoorte cave where such remains were found. Thylacoleo was a carnivore with shearing premolars and an opposable clawed thumb, and it survived until roughly 45,000 years ago. That overlaps the earliest firm dates for people on the continent.
- - Fossil site D at Riversleigh. An outcrop at the Riversleigh fossil mammal site in northwest Queensland, photographed in 2011. Riversleigh preserves rainforest faunas from the Oligocene and Miocene, tens of millions of years before people reached Australia. It is inscribed on the World Heritage List jointly with Naracoorte.
- - Turtle engraving at Ben Buckler. An engraved turtle in the rock at Ben Buckler above North Bondi in Sydney. Engravings on the Hawkesbury sandstone were made by pecking a line of holes and joining them. Their age cannot be measured directly and estimates rest on weathering and on what is depicted.
- - Marsupial lion skeleton at Naracoorte. A reconstructed Thylacoleo carnifex skeleton in the Victoria Fossil Cave at Naracoorte in South Australia, photographed in 2012. The caves acted as pitfall traps and accumulated animals over hundreds of thousands of years. Whether people or climate ended the megafauna is one of the sharpest arguments in Australian prehistory.
- - Mungo sand dunes near Vigars Well. Sand dunes in Mungo National Park photographed in 2013. Wind driven sand buried hearths, shell middens and human burials on the old lake shore in layers that archaeologists can read as a sequence. Fossil trackways of human footprints from about 20,000 years ago were recorded nearby in 2003.
- - Kangaroo engraving at Glades Bay. A carved kangaroo on a rock platform in Glades Bay Park at Gladesville on the Parramatta River in Sydney, photographed in 2013. Suburban parks preserve much of what survives of Sydney's engraving sites. Most were on land cleared for housing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- - Grinding grooves at Glades Bay. Grooves worn into a sandstone shelf at Glades Bay Park in Sydney where stone hatchet heads were ground to an edge against wet rock. Ground edge axe technology appears in the Madjedbebe deposit tens of thousands of years before it appears in Europe or western Asia. Grooves like these were still being made when the British arrived.
- - Wulaba Track sign, Glades Bay Park. An interpretive sign on the Wulaba Track at Gladesville in Sydney, photographed in 2013. Wulaba is the Sydney language word for a wallaby. Local councils began naming and interpreting these sites from the 1990s.
- - Diprotodon mounted in Paris. A cast of a Diprotodon skeleton on display at the Gallery of Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy of the French National Museum of Natural History, photographed in 2013. Casts of Australian megafauna were distributed to European museums from the nineteenth century. Richard Owen described the genus in London in 1838 from teeth sent from New South Wales.
- - Emus at the Walls of China. Emus on the lunette in Mungo National Park in 2014. Lake Mungo held water and supported fish, mussels and waterbirds when people camped along its shore, and middens record what they ate. The lake bed has been dry for thousands of years.
- - Emus crossing Mungo. Four emus walking across the Mungo landscape in November 2014. The Willandra Lakes Region, of which Mungo is part, was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1981 for its record of human occupation. It was one of the first places listed for that reason anywhere.
- - Hafted stone knife. A stone blade set into a handle, photographed from the Wellcome collection. Hafting a worked stone into a gum and fibre grip is the step that turns a flake into a tool with leverage. Resin hafting is documented in Australian deposits many thousands of years old.
- - Backed blade in a skin handle. A steeply backed stone blade mounted in a hairy skin handle, from the Wellcome collection. Backed blades appear in large numbers in southeastern Australian sites from about 4,000 years ago and then decline. Why they were adopted and abandoned is unresolved.
- - Floodplains below the Ubirr escarpment. The view from the sandstone escarpment towards the Kakadu floodplains in 2015. Sea level was far lower for most of the period of human occupation here and the coast lay hundreds of kilometres further out. The wetlands in this image are only a few thousand years old.
- - Kakadu escarpment from the air. The ranges and sandstone escarpments of Kakadu National Park photographed from a light aircraft in 2015. The escarpment shelters at the foot of these cliffs hold occupation deposits and painted walls in the same sequence. The park was inscribed on the World Heritage List for both natural and cultural criteria.
- - Mungo Man handed back to traditional owners for long journey home. 41,000 years, the oldest human remains so far found in Australia. Filed as a deep time record, posted by NITV in 2015.
- - Author Tom Keneally on 'Mungo Man'. ', published by National Museum of Australia. The Willandra Lakes remains are dated to about 41,000 years, the oldest human remains so far found in Australia. Filed as a deep time record, posted by National Museum of Australia in 2016.
- - The Ubirr plateau facing south. The rock platform at Ubirr in the East Alligator region of Kakadu National Park, photographed in 2016. Madjedbebe, the shelter that produced the oldest securely dated occupation deposit in Australia, lies on Mirarr Country a short distance from here. The 2017 excavation there returned an age of about 65,000 years, a figure that Chris Clarkson's team published in Nature and that other archaeologists have contested on grounds of possible downward movement of artefacts in the sand.
- - Ubirr looking north over the wetlands. The same plateau at Ubirr looking the other way across the East Alligator floodplain. The dispute over the Madjedbebe dates turns on whether stone artefacts sank through unconsolidated sandy sediment into older layers below them. Critics including Jim Allen and James O'Connell argue for a younger arrival closer to 50,000 years.
- - Inside the Victoria Fossil Cave. Chambers of the Victoria Fossil Cave at Naracoorte, photographed in 2016. The fossil deposit was found in 1969 behind a narrow passage. Naracoorte was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1994.
- - Sandstone pillars near Anbangbang. Weathered sandstone at the Anbangbang shelter area in Kakadu, looking towards Arnhem Land, photographed in 2017. The shelter was excavated in 1981 and produced deposits going back tens of thousands of years. No part of this country was empty when Europeans reached it.
- - Giant wombat skull. The skull of a giant wombat on display at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, photographed in 2017. Phascolonus gigas weighed a couple of hundred kilograms and grazed across the inland. Its remains occur in the same lake deposits as Diprotodon.
- - Interpretive sign for the Eulo Diprotodon. A sign at Eulo in southwestern Queensland explaining the megafauna deposit found nearby in 2011, one of the densest concentrations of such fossils recorded in Australia according to the sign, and including a large Diprotodon. Country towns market their fossil sites as tourist attractions. The scientific site itself is not open to visitors.
- - Mungo Man: What to do next with Australia's oldest human remains | Australian Story (2018). Mungo Man: What to do next with Australia's oldest human remains, published by ABC News In-depth. The Willandra Lakes remains are dated to about 41,000 years, the oldest human remains so far found in Australia. The footage depicts events of 2018. Filed as a deep time record, from footage of 2018 held by ABC News In-depth.
- - New History of Humans in Australia for 65,000yr in Buried Tools & Pigments.. 2019.
- - Rock engravings above North Bondi. Aboriginal engravings pecked into the sandstone at the Bondi golf course in Sydney, photographed in 2019. The Sydney sandstone carries thousands of such engravings, most recorded only after much had already been quarried or built over. This is Gadigal and Birrabirragal Country.
- - Bulgandry engraving site. The engraved male figure known as Bulgandry in Brisbane Water National Park on the New South Wales central coast, photographed in 2019. The site is fenced and boardwalked because foot traffic wears the shallow grooves away. It sits on Darkinjung Country.
- - First Aboriginal cultural sites discovered underwater 50,000 years later. 2020.
- - Archaeologists in Focus. 2020.
- - The Mystery of Mungo Man and Mungo Lady - The skeletons that rewrote human history. 41,000 years, the oldest human remains so far found in Australia. Filed as a deep time record, posted by History Skills in 2022.
- - Mungo Man and Mungo Lady to be reburied in unmarked graves | ABC News. Mungo Man and Mungo Lady to be reburied in unmarked graves, published by ABC News (Australia). The Willandra Lakes remains are dated to about 41,000 years, the oldest human remains so far found in Australia. Filed as a deep time record, posted by ABC News (Australia) in 2022.
- - Remains of Mungo Man and Lady finally laid to rest | The Point | NITV. Remains of Mungo Man and Lady finally laid to rest, published by NITV. The Willandra Lakes remains are dated to about 41,000 years, the oldest human remains so far found in Australia. Filed as a deep time record, posted by NITV in 2022.
- - Food animals painted at Ubirr. A painted panel at Ubirr showing animals taken as food by the local clan, photographed in 2022. The barramundi and the long necked turtle appear repeatedly in the freshwater period style. That style postdates the flooding of the coastal plain some six thousand years ago.
- - Stone implements in the Australian Museum. Stone tools from the collections of the Australian Museum in Sydney, photographed in 2022. Museum collections were assembled largely without permission and their provenance records are often thin. Provenance is what makes a stone tool archaeologically useful, and without it an artefact is close to mute.
- - Diprotodon at the Western Australian Museum. The mounted Diprotodon at the Western Australian Museum in Perth, photographed in 2023. Megafauna extinction in Australia was largely complete by about 40,000 years ago. Firestick burning, hunting and a drying climate have each been argued as the cause and the evidence does not yet settle it.
- - Mungo National Park. The dry country of Mungo National Park in far western New South Wales, photographed in 2024. The remains known as Mungo Lady and Mungo Man were found in these lunettes in 1969 and 1974, dated to about 42,000 years, and Mungo Lady is the earliest known cremation anywhere. The park lies on Barkandji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa Country and the three groups were jointly involved in the return of the remains.
- - Didirrgun, Kennedy Hill. The shell midden known as Didirrgun, or Kennedy Hill, at Broome in Western Australia, photographed in 2024. Middens are accumulations of discarded shell that record generations of shellfish gathering and can be radiocarbon dated layer by layer. An Aboriginal community called Mallingbarr lived beside the hill and had left by 2024.
- - Diprotodon skeleton cast. A cast of a Diprotodon skeleton, the original collected at Lake Callabonna in South Australia in 1893 by Edward Stirling and Amandus Zietz. Diprotodon was the largest marsupial known, roughly the size of a rhinoceros. Lake Callabonna preserved whole articulated animals that had become bogged in the drying lake bed.
- - Phascolonus skull cast with a footprint depression. A cast of a giant wombat skull from Lake Callabonna, collected in 1970 by Clayton Ray, showing a depression that has been read as the print of a Diprotodon foot pressed into it. The animal died in the drying lake mud and was trodden on before burial. Taphonomy of this kind is how a bone bed is reconstructed as an event.
- - 🌍The Ancient Secrets of the Willandra Lakes Region 🌍. 🌍, published by UNESCO Tour. The Willandra Lakes remains are dated to about 41,000 years, the oldest human remains so far found in Australia. Filed as a deep time record, posted by UNESCO Tour in 2024.
- - Megafauna: What Killed Australia's Giant Beasts? | DOCUMENTARY. Megafauna: What Killed Australia's Giant Beasts, published by ABC Science. Filed as a deep time record, posted by ABC Science in 2025.
- - Walls Road towards the Mungo lunette. The track running towards the eroding clay and sand ridge known as the Walls of China in Mungo National Park, photographed on 16 February 2025. The lunette formed on the eastern shore of a lake that dried out around 14,000 years ago. Erosion of the ridge is what exposes the archaeology, and it also destroys it.
- - The humans that roamed Australia 50,000 years ago. 2025.
- - Mungo Man DNA REWRITES Australian HISTORY. 41,000 years, the oldest human remains so far found in Australia. Filed as a deep time record, posted by Poker Desatado in 2025.
- - Australia’s Ancient Human History Explained | The 65,000-Year Archaeology Debate English Video. Australia’s Ancient Human History Explained, published by Best History 01. Filed as a deep time record, posted by Best History 01 in 2026.
- - 65,000 Year Old Site In Australia Reveals An Impossible Journey (And It Changes Everything). ), published by Aleeya34 and concerning Northern Territory. Clarkson and colleagues published a date of 65,000 years in Nature in July 2017, a figure contested by O'Connell and colleagues in 2018 and by Williams and colleagues in 2021. Filed as a deep time record, posted by Aleeya34 in 2026.
- - Ancient Human Settlement In Australia Pushes Back Human Arrival By 20,000 Years!. 65,000 years in Nature in July 2017, a figure contested by O'Connell and colleagues in 2018 and by Williams and colleagues in 2021. Filed as a deep time record, posted by Future Original Discovery in 2026.
- - DNA Just Revealed the True Origins of the First Australians. 2026.
- - The First Voyagers: DNA Reveals the Impossible 65,000-Year Journey. 65,000 years in Nature in July 2017, a figure contested by O'Connell and colleagues in 2018 and by Williams and colleagues in 2021. Filed as a deep time record, posted by GenealogyX in 2026.
- - Scientists Finally Solved The First Australians Mystery, After 50,000 Years. 65,000 years in Nature in July 2017, a figure contested by O'Connell and colleagues in 2018 and by Williams and colleagues in 2021. Filed as a deep time record, posted by Genome Chronicles in 2026.
- - The FIRST Australians: How Ancient Humans Survived 50,000 Years Ago - History for Sleep. 2026.
- - New DNA Just Rewrote When The First Australians Actually Arrived. 65,000 years in Nature in July 2017, a figure contested by O'Connell and colleagues in 2018 and by Williams and colleagues in 2021. Filed as a deep time record, posted by DNA Archives in 2026.
- - This Arnhem Land Dig Could Rewrite the Timeline of the First Australians. 65,000 years in Nature in July 2017, a figure contested by O'Connell and colleagues in 2018 and by Williams and colleagues in 2021. Filed as a deep time record, posted by Deep Time in 2026.
- - Devil's Lair: Was ABOX-Datierung in der Höhle fand, schockiert Forscher. 2026.
- - 65,000 Years Under a Rock Shelter: The Mystery of Madjedbebe. 65,000 years in Nature in July 2017, a figure contested by O'Connell and colleagues in 2018 and by Williams and colleagues in 2021. Filed as a deep time record, posted by Prehistoric Mysteries in 2026.
- - The Fires of Lake Mungo, The World's Oldest Funeral. 41,000 years, the oldest human remains so far found in Australia. Filed as a deep time record, posted by FBA humans in 2026.
- - The Date That Won't Reconcile With the Genetics. 65,000 years in Nature in July 2017, a figure contested by O'Connell and colleagues in 2018 and by Williams and colleagues in 2021. Filed as a deep time record, posted by The First Ones in 2026.