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Bus stop an execution site … 1500 years ago By Richard Macey November 26, 2005 Allen Madden and Dr Denise Donion of the University of Sydney with Octavia Man. Photo: Edwina Pickles HIS crime will probably never be known. But "he sure trod on someone's toes", said Allen Madden, cultural and heritage officer for the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council. In January, when EnergyAustralia workers laying cables in Ocean Street, Narrabeen, found human bones beneath a bus stop, they called police. The remains have since been identified as those of an Aborigine who died up to 1500 years ago. Next...

Contact: Gifford Miller gmiller@colorado.edu 303-492-6962 Jim Scott 303-492-3114 University of Colorado at Boulder Arid Australian interior linked to landscape burning by ancient humans The image of a controlled burn in the interior of Australia today, featured on the cover of the January 2005 issue of Geology, illustrates how Australia might have looked 50,000 years ago. Photo courtesy Gifford Miller, University of Colorado at Boulder Click here for a high resolution photograph. Landscape burning by ancient hunters and gatherers may have triggered the failure of the annual Australian Monsoon some 12,000 years ago, resulting in the desertification of the country's interior...

SYDNEY (AFP) - The chance discovery of the remains of a prehistoric giant kangaroo has cast doubts on the long-held view that climate change drove it and other mega-fauna to extinction, a new study reveals. < > He said that it was likely that hunting killed off Tasmania's mega-fauna -- including the long-muzzled, 120 kilogram (264 pound) giant kangaroo, a rhinoceros-sized wombat and marsupial 'lions' which resembled leopards. < > The finding of the latest study has already been contested, with Judith Field of the University of Sydney saying the idea that humans killed the giant creatures was "in the...

A new study of the 37,000-year old remains of the "Deep Skull" - the oldest modern human discovered in island South-East Asia - has revealed this ancient person was not related to Indigenous Australians, as had been originally thought. The Deep Skull was also likely to have been an older woman, rather than a teenage boy. The research, led by UNSW Australia Associate Professor Darren Curnoe, represents the most detailed investigation of the ancient cranium specimen since it was found in Niah Cave in Sarawak in 1958. "Our analysis overturns long-held views about the early history of this region," says...

The Bramble Cay melomys has become more famous in extinction than it ever was in life. A mouse-like rodent, the melomys amazingly survived on a 3.6 hectare grass-covered cay (a low-lying island in a coral reef) in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef like a ratty Robinson Crusoe for thousands of years. There, it thrived off just a few plant species until human-caused climate change—in the form of rising sea levels and increasing inundations of sea water on the low-lying island—wiped it off the planet. But, while the extinction has been reported widely, articles have missed an important point: the scientists who...

A suspected car bomb was detonated outside a Perth mosque on Tuesday night as hundreds of worshippers attended a prayer service inside. No one inside the Thornlie Mosque was injured when the white 4WD exploded shortly after 8pm outside the Thornlie mosque, near the Australian Islamic College in Perth’s southern suburbs. Anti-Islamic graffiti was also sprayed on a fence.

Australia's republican movement says membership has surged in the wake of the Brexit vote, as Australians question the benefits of remaining part of “little Britain”. An “AusExit” campaign, including calls to remove the Union Jack from the flag and remove the British monarch as head of state, has gained momentum since Friday, when Britain voted to leave the European Union. Peter FitzSimons, the chairman of Australia’s republican movement, said Australia had belonged to the British empire but the historic ties between the nations had become less relevant because “Great Britain barely exists anymore”. “It’s one thing for the monarchists to...

Faithful Catholics in the Australian diocese of Wollongong are expressing frustration after the bishop canceled a presentation defending marriage, instead joining LGBT activists in their pro-homosexual propaganda on church property. On June 14 the Australian Family Association (AFA) was scheduled to deliver a presentation at the hall of St. Therese Catholic School in Wollongong, about 50 miles south of Sydney. The AFA describes as its mission "to cultivate within society an appreciation that the integrity and well-being of the family is essential to the stability, morale, security and prosperity of the Australian nation." A flyer for the event was emailed...

Russia is not the country you think it is. Its economy is smaller than South Korea’s. Its people are poorer than Kazakhstan’s. It trails Finland in technology. And it has a smaller military budget than Saudi Arabia... ...Russia hosted the Olympics, punched Georgia in the nose, took back the Crimea, invaded Ukraine, flew bombers through NATO airspace, built military bases in the Arctic, and generally flexed and posed like an oiled, aged, but still buff, body builder. And we’ve been paying increasingly rapt attention, not noticing the geriatric walker hidden just off stage. A closer look is almost shocking. According...

Gruesome details about Australia’s military were revealed after a public inquiry on child sex abuse discovered how recruits were forced to rape one another as part of a sick initiation practice. The abuse went unnoticed for decades. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse has received no fewer than 111 reports of incidents of sexual abuse carried out against navy cadets as young as 15 in the 1960s right through to the 1980s. The harrowing ordeals involved instructions to rape each other, as well as carry out other, equally brutal attacks. Two institutions accounted for over 50...

SYDNEY, Australia - Australian researchers say rising sea levels have wiped out a rodent that lived on a tiny outcrop in the Great Barrier Reef, in what they say is the first documented extinction of a mammal species due to human-caused climate change. The rodent was known to have lived only on Bramble Cay, a minuscule atoll in the northeast Torres Strait, between the Cape York Peninsula in the Australian state of Queensland and the southern shores of Papua New Guinea. The long-tailed, whiskered creature, called the Bramble Cay melomys, was considered the only mammal endemic to the Great Barrier...

An Australian university recently censured marine scientist Paul Ridd for “failing to act in a collegial way and in the academic spirit of the institution,” because he questioned popular claims among environmentalists about coral reefs and global warming. What was Ridd’s crime? He found out two of the world’s leading organizations studying coral reefs were using misleading photographs to make the case that global warming was causing a mass reef die-off. Ridd wasn’t rewarded for checking the facts and blowing the whistle on misleading science. Instead, James Cook University censured Ridd and threatened to fire him for questioning global warming...

Why is America so alarmed by Brexit? Lest the reader be in doubt, remind yourself of this. Never before has a sitting US president visited a fellow democracy in a bid to sway an election. Nor, until now, have 13 former US secretaries of state and defence risked addressing a letter to a foreign electorate with the same motive. Ditto eight former Treasury secretaries and five former supreme commanders of NATO. Not only has the US establishment broken its non-interference rule over Brexit, it is stamping on its smithereens. If we did not know better, it might seem the UK...

Feminist theorist and author Germaine Greer said that the concept of motherhood has been “emptied out” and is “gone” in a lecture on women’s progress at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales on May 23. The outspoken Australian feminist, who once compared motherhood to captivity, critiqued the “concept” of motherhood at a time in which in vitro fertilization (IVF) has become increasingly popular. […] Greer also voiced her disapproval of singer/songwriter Elton John naming his same-sex “wife” David Furnish as the “mother” on their sons’ birth certificates. “Sir Elton John and his ‘wife,’ David Furnish, have entered on the birth...

The massive structure - almost a mile long - contains a spiral design, with several rectangular spirals that form a giant structure, archaeologists say. "This structure, which has dimensions of more than 1,500 m × 600 m (about 1 mile by 1,970 feet) is the most striking discovery associated with Angkor Wat to date. Its function remains unknown and, as yet, it has no known equivalent in the Angkorian world," Roland Fletcher, a University of Sydney professor, said in a statement put out by the university. Today, the spiral structure is hard to make out on the ground, having been...

Jean-Baptiste Chevance senses that we’re closing in on our target. Paused in a jungle clearing in northwestern Cambodia, the French archaeologist studies his GPS and mops the sweat from his forehead with a bandanna. The temperature is pushing 95, and the equatorial sun beats down through the forest canopy. For two hours, Chevance, known to everyone as JB, has been leading me, along with a two-man Cambodian research team, on a grueling trek. We’ve ripped our arms and faces on six-foot shrubs studded with thorns, been savaged by red biting ants, and stumbled over vines that stretch at ankle height...

Mary Beth Day, University of Cambridge Bayon temple, constructed by Angkorian King Jayavarman VII in the late 12th century. The faces may be representations of Buddha, the bodhisattva Lokesvara, Jayavarman VII, or a combination. The ancient city of Angkor — the most famous monument of which is the breathtaking ruined temple of Angkor Wat — might have collapsed due to valiant but ultimately failed efforts to battle drought, scientists find. The great city of Angkor in Cambodia, first established in the ninth century, was the capital of the Khmer Empire, the major player in southeast Asia for nearly five centuries....

The researchers disovered at least 74 new temples The great medieval temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia was once at the centre of a sprawling urban settlement, according to a new, detailed map of the area.Using Nasa satellites, an international team have discovered at least 74 new temples and complex irrigation systems. The map, published in the journal PNAS, extends the known settlement by 1000 sq km, about the size of Los Angeles. Analysis also lends weight to the theory that Angkor's residents were architects of the city's demise. "The large-scale city engineered its own downfall by disrupting its...

CHICAGO (AFP) - Archaeologists using radar imagery have shown that an ancient Cambodian settlement centered on the celebrated temple of Angkor Wat was far more extensive than previously thought, a study released Monday said. The medieval settlement surrounding Angkor, the one-time capital of the illustrious Khmer empire which flourished between the ninth and 14th centuries, covered a 3,000 square kilometer area (1,158 square miles). The urban complex was at least three times larger than archaeologists had previously suspected and easily the largest pre-industrial urban area of its kind, eclipsing comparable developments such as Tikal a Classic Maya "city" in Guatemala....

Jungle-Covered Ruins May Hold Surprising Hints by Brian Thomas, M.S. The ancient and elaborate temple at Angkor Wat is not the only interesting site to see when visiting Cambodia. Archaeologists have been discovering hundreds of temples, many still buried beneath thick jungle growth, strewn across the whole surrounding area. A picture is emerging of buildings that connected a thriving society across a broad region. Could soon-to-be uncovered stone carvings somehow intersect with biblical history? Australian archaeologist Damian Evans employed "lidar" technology to find new temples far faster than the old way—that of hacking through jungle and hoping to hit some...