Posted on 06/20/2025 5:36:38 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
It has long been thought that Australia's Eastern Highlands acted as a barrier to human settlement during the last Ice Age. The treeless and frozen landscape was considered too inhospitable for people to live there, even temporarily. According to a report in The Guardian, however, new research conducted by Australian Museum, the University of Sydney, and the Australian National University in collaboration with First Nations community members indicates that this was not the case. During recent excavations at the Dargan Shelter in the Blue Mountains led by Dharug custodian and knowledge holder Wayne Brennan and archaeologist Amy Mosig Way of the University of Sydney and the Australian Museum, the team uncovered hundreds of stone artifacts and in situ hearths that suggest humans lived there for by at least 20,000 years ago. "It's just such a kind of mind-blowing experience when you unearth an artifact that was last touched by someone 20,000 years ago," said Way. Located at an elevation of 3,500 feet above sea level, the cave is the highest Ice Age site in Australia that humans occupied. Researchers believe that at the time the average temperature would have been much colder than it is today, water would have been frozen much of the year, and firewood would have been hard to procure. The new study lends support to other recent global findings that indicate ancient humans were hardier than previously thought and that icy climates did not block them from traveling through or inhabiting high-altitude environments. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Nature Human Behaviour.
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
It’s amazing how many scientists subscribe to uniformitarianism to the point of error.
If the water hadn’t all been tied up as ice (plus, y’know, Australia is a dry-assed place), they could have skipped stones.
“How would one find river/lake/ocean shore rocks worn smooth when it was the Ice Age? Was there ANY open water?”
Over millions of years there were may ancient streams and rivers that were later buried and become desert. So strata with layers of smooth Cobbles can be found just about everywhere in Ravines.
Glaciers.
Yup.
When they decided to start a man cave back then, it was an *actual cave*. I’m kinda jealous.
Got it. Thanks! Never occurred to me that the round stones would’ve been buried. Duh. ;)
Even then it can still be challenging sometimes though. You have to be lucky enough to find a ravine that cut down into a layer of those Cobbles. That is why ancient man had their common quarry locations they had to travel to in order to find the good stuff. And this is why rock was the first bartering currency. Those who couldn’t get to the Quarry had to trade for rock from those who could. :)
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I looked it up. There was no widespread ice sheet in Australia. Only a few small sporadic glaciers in the Snowy Mountains and Tasmania, covering less than 1,000 km² combined.
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