Cuddie Springs is a notable
archaeological
Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...
and
paleontological
Paleontology (), also spelled palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (geology), epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes t ...
site in the semi-arid zone of central northern
New South Wales
)
, nickname =
, image_map = New South Wales in Australia.svg
, map_caption = Location of New South Wales in AustraliaCoordinates:
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name = Australia
, established_title = Before federation
, es ...
, Australia, near
Carinda
Carinda is a town in the far north of New South Wales, Australia. The town is in the Walgett Shire local government area. In 2016, the town had a population of 158.
The name of the town is derived from an Aboriginal word meaning 'you carry'.
...
in
Walgett Shire
Walgett Shire is a local government area in the Orana region of New South Wales, Australia. The northern boundary of the Shire is located adjacent to the border between New South Wales and Queensland. The town of Walgett is located on the Namoi ...
. Cuddie Springs is an open site, with the
fossil
A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...
deposits preserved in a
claypan Claypan is a dense, compact, slowly permeable layer in the subsoil. It has a much higher clay content than the overlying material, from which it is separated by a sharply defined boundary. The dense structure restricts root growth and water infiltra ...
on the floor of an ancient
ephemeral lake
A lake is an area filled with water, localized in a basin, surrounded by land, and distinct from any river or other outlet that serves to feed or drain the lake. Lakes lie on land and are not part of the ocean, although, like the much larger ...
. The claypan fills with water after local rainstorms and often takes months to dry, a fact which facilitated the survival of fossils over a long period of time.
The site provided the first unequivocal association of stone
artefacts with fossil remains of
Australian megafauna
The term Australian megafauna refers to the megafauna in Australia during the Pleistocene Epoch. Most of these species became extinct during the latter half of the Pleistocene, and the roles of human and climatic factors in their extinction are ...
. Cuddie Springs has been known as a fossil megafauna locality since the late 1870s, when a well was sunk into the centre of the claypan. The
Australian Museum
The Australian Museum is a heritage-listed museum at 1 William Street, Sydney central business district, New South Wales, Australia. It is the oldest museum in Australia,Design 5, 2016, p.1 and the fifth oldest natural history museum in the ...
launched excavations in 1933 and while many bones were found, no archaeological discoveries were made in that initial research. More extensive excavations were conducted between 1991 and 1996 by a team from the
University of New South Wales
The University of New South Wales (UNSW), also known as UNSW Sydney, is a public research university based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is one of the founding members of Group of Eight, a coalition of Australian research-intensive ...
and were continued between 1997 and 2009 through the
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney (USYD), also known as Sydney University, or informally Sydney Uni, is a public research university located in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and is one of the country's si ...
.
Etymology
It was recorded that the word 'Cuddy' in the language of the "Marra Blacks" means bad. This has been interpreted as a reference to the quality of the water found in the Cuddie lake, which is
alkaline
In chemistry, an alkali (; from ar, القلوي, al-qaly, lit=ashes of the saltwort) is a base (chemistry), basic, ionic compound, ionic salt (chemistry), salt of an alkali metal or an alkaline earth metal. An alkali can also be defined as ...
with a pH between 7 and 9. Despite the name, Cuddie Springs is an ephemeral lake, and not a
spring
Spring(s) may refer to:
Common uses
* Spring (season), a season of the year
* Spring (device), a mechanical device that stores energy
* Spring (hydrology), a natural source of water
* Spring (mathematics), a geometric surface in the shape of a ...
.
Excavation history
In the historic period, Cuddie Springs was known to both Aboriginal and European people as a palaeontological site. A
Dreaming story about Mullyan the eaglehawk is associated to the formation of the bone deposits at the site and the formation of the
Macquarie Marshes
The Macquarie Marshes comprise the wetlands associated with the floodplains of the Macquarie River and its tributaries, in northern New South Wales, Australia. The Macquarie River and the marshes eventually drain into the Darling River. The ma ...
to the south and the site is also part of a
Dreaming track tied to the Macquarie Marshes and the Geera waterhole on the
Barwon River.
Europeans first settled in the area around Cuddie Springs in the 1830s. A
well
A well is an excavation or structure created in the ground by digging, driving, or drilling to access liquid resources, usually water. The oldest and most common kind of well is a water well, to access groundwater in underground aquifers. The ...
was sunk into the middle of the claypan in 1876, the disused superstructure of which was still present in the 1920s. During the sinking of the well in the 1870s several large fossilised bones were recovered and were sent to the
Australian Museum
The Australian Museum is a heritage-listed museum at 1 William Street, Sydney central business district, New South Wales, Australia. It is the oldest museum in Australia,Design 5, 2016, p.1 and the fifth oldest natural history museum in the ...
, some of which were later sent to
Richard Owen
Sir Richard Owen (20 July 1804 – 18 December 1892) was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and paleontologist. Owen is generally considered to have been an outstanding naturalist with a remarkable gift for interpreting fossils.
Owe ...
who identified the fossils as belonging to different genus of
Diprotodon
''Diprotodon'' (Ancient Greek: "two protruding front teeth") is an extinct genus of marsupial from the Pleistocene of Australia, containing one species, ''D. optatum''. The earliest finds date to 1.77 million to 780,000 years ago, but most speci ...
,
Euowenia
''Euowenia'' is an extinct genus of Diprotodontia which existed from the Pliocene to the upper Pleistocene. Weighing around 500 kg, ''Euowenia'' is only known from three locations on mainland Australia, Chinchilla in Queensland, Menindee ...
,
Nototherium
''Nototherium'' ("Southern Beast") is an extinct genus of diprotodontid marsupial from Australia and New Guinea. This mammal had hypsodont molars and weighed around 500kg.Ross D.E. MacPhee, Hans-Dieter Sues, 1999,
Extinctions in Near Time, p. ...
,
Genyornis
''Genyornis newtoni'', also known as thunder bird and mihirung paringmal (meaning "giant bird"), is an extinct species of large, flightless bird that lived in Australia during the Pleistocene epoch until around 50,000 years ago. Over two met ...
, various
Macropodidae
Macropodidae is a family of marsupials that includes kangaroos, wallabies, tree-kangaroos, wallaroos, pademelons, quokkas, and several other groups. These genera are allied to the suborder Macropodiformes, containing other macropods, and ar ...
,
Megalania
Megalania (''Varanus priscus'') is an extinct species of giant monitor lizard, part of the megafaunal assemblage that inhabited Australia during the Pleistocene. It is the largest terrestrial lizard known to have existed, reaching an estimated ...
and at least one genus of crocodile, ''
Pallimnarchus
''Paludirex'' (meaning "swamp king") is an extinct genus of mekosuchine crocodylians from the Pliocene and Pleistocene of Australia. Remains of this animal have been found in the Riversleigh lagerstätte of northwestern Queensland. It was a medi ...
''.
Despite attempts in the 1920s to excavate it was not until 1933 that the first excavations took place at Cuddie Springs. Led by the Australian Museum, the principal researchers described the excavation thus:
We commenced our excavations about 10 yards from the well, working towards the centre, and before work was stopped, about five weeks later, the claypan resembled the fields of Flanders, with a complicated series of trenches and pits, mostly about 5 feet in depth, but in one case about 15 feet.
Though a range of paleontological material was recovered from the site, no archaeological material was identified in the 1933 excavation. Full scale excavations at the site recommenced in 1991 after excavations designed to test the possibility of
pollen
Pollen is a powdery substance produced by seed plants. It consists of pollen grains (highly reduced microgametophytes), which produce male gametes (sperm cells). Pollen grains have a hard coat made of sporopollenin that protects the gametophyt ...
preservation at the site uncovered a high concentration of bone and a dense layer of
flaked
''Flaked'' is an American comedy drama streaming television series created by Will Arnett and Mark Chappell. It stars Arnett as Chip, a self-appointed "guru" who falls in love. The first season consisted of eight episodes and was released on Netfl ...
stone artefacts, indicating the site had archaeological as well as paleontological potential.
The main archaeological excavations were carried out between 1996 and 2009. The majority of the excavated material is currently stored at the Australian Museum, and has featured in major exhibitions.
Site setting
Cuddie Springs is located within the semi-arid zone, but
palynological
Palynology is the "study of dust" (from grc-gre, παλύνω, palynō, "strew, sprinkle" and ''-logy'') or of "particles that are strewn". A classic palynologist analyses particulate samples collected from the air, from water, or from deposit ...
evidence indicates that 40,000 years ago there was a large permanent lake surrounded by open shrub land suitable for supporting megafauna.
Evidence for human co-existence with Australian megafauna
The excavators of Cuddie Springs reject humans as the primary cause of
megafauna extinctions. They conclude that the 10,000 years of co-habitation of humans and
megafauna
In terrestrial zoology, the megafauna (from Greek μέγας ''megas'' "large" and New Latin ''fauna'' "animal life") comprises the large or giant animals of an area, habitat, or geological period, extinct and/or extant. The most common threshold ...
at Cuddie Springs suggests that climate changes that began before the human
colonisation of Australia
Colonization, or colonisation, constitutes large-scale population movements wherein migrants maintain strong links with their, or their ancestors', former country – by such links, gain advantage over other inhabitants of the territory. When ...
were responsible for the megafauna extinctions. Wroe and Field cite the staggered extinctions that have been occurring since at least 130,000 years ago and the fact that megafauna in
Tasmania
)
, nickname =
, image_map = Tasmania in Australia.svg
, map_caption = Location of Tasmania in AustraliaCoordinates:
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdi ...
do not occur after 46,000 years ago but people only arrived across a land bridge at 37,000 years ago. This staggered decline, mostly occurring in contexts independent of humans, is linked to environmental evidence for increasingly arid and erratic conditions since 400–300,000 years ago. The large body size of the megafauna suggests low
fecundity
Fecundity is defined in two ways; in human demography, it is the potential for reproduction of a recorded population as opposed to a sole organism, while in population biology, it is considered similar to fertility, the natural capability to pr ...
and low population densities which have been argued to have made them susceptible to extinction due to habitat loss from increasing aridity.
The 10,000 years of co-habitation of humans and megafauna at Cuddie Springs that is the foundation of Wroe and Field's argument has been the subject of intense critical examination. This critique has identified a number of details that weaken the integrity of the association between humans and megafauna. First are the finds themselves, such as relatively large number of
grinding stone
Millstones or mill stones are stones used in gristmills, for grinding wheat or other grains. They are sometimes referred to as grindstones or grinding stones.
Millstones come in pairs: a convex stationary base known as the ''bedstone'' and ...
s in
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological Epoch (geology), epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was fina ...
-age layers, as well as tula-adze-like flakes. The Pleistocene grinding stones are notable because they imply a broad-spectrum plant-processing economy much earlier than previously known in Australia. These finds are anomalous because in other parts of Australia they are restricted to late
Holocene
The Holocene ( ) is the current geological epoch. It began approximately 11,650 cal years Before Present (), after the Last Glacial Period, which concluded with the Holocene glacial retreat. The Holocene and the preceding Pleistocene togethe ...
contexts. Amongst the megafauna bone layers there is a tooth of a crocodile, ''
Pallimnarchus
''Paludirex'' (meaning "swamp king") is an extinct genus of mekosuchine crocodylians from the Pliocene and Pleistocene of Australia. Remains of this animal have been found in the Riversleigh lagerstätte of northwestern Queensland. It was a medi ...
'' sp., that became extinct long before 40,000 years ago. The tooth is also
exfoliated and heavily mineralised and the preservation is not consistent with other bone and teeth in the same level. There are
stone artefacts with hair and blood adhering, but in the same layers there are megafauna bones with not even traces of protein remaining.
These inconsistent finds suggest that the process of site formation may have involved some mixing of materials of different ages. This leads to the second important detail, the
stratigraphy
Stratigraphy is a branch of geology concerned with the study of rock (geology), rock layers (Stratum, strata) and layering (stratification). It is primarily used in the study of sedimentary rock, sedimentary and layered volcanic rocks.
Stratigrap ...
. Cuddie Springs is unusual in having a dense
deflation pavement that separates recent materials (such as cow bones) from the Pleistocene layers. The layers above the pavement contains cow bones mixed with megafauna bones but the layers below contain no cow bones. Archaeology Professor Bruno David has asked where the rocks in this pavement come from in a stone-poor
riverine plain, and suggested that they may have been carried by Aboriginal people from a
gibber plain
A desert pavement, also called reg (in the western Sahara), serir (eastern Sahara), gibber (in Australia), or saï (central Asia) is a desert surface covered with closely packed, interlocking angular or rounded rock fragments of pebble and cobbl ...
4 km from the site or by farmers during the late 19th or early 20th century to create a firm footing for people or cattle. Gillespie and Brook also suggest that the stone artefacts in the pavement are unusually dense for a Pleistocene
archaeological site
An archaeological site is a place (or group of physical sites) in which evidence of past activity is preserved (either prehistoric or historic or contemporary), and which has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology an ...
and may have been transported during well construction or represent an in situ but late Holocene archaeological site overlaying disturbed Late Pleistocene sediments. There is a long history of European activity at Cuddie Springs, with a well dug in 1876, ten metres from the 1990s excavation and trenches dug by the Australian Museum in 1933. These events likely caused disturbance of the stratigraphy. Gillespie and Brook add that cattle visiting the well may have pushed stone artefacts through the pavement into the Pleistocene layers during waterlogged conditions. Tracing the origins of the pavement is crucial to understanding the integrity of the Pleistocene layers.
Several authors have suggested that the Pleistocene stone artefacts and megafauna bones may have derived from separate contexts that have become mixed by underground water flow. Because it is a ground-fed spring and a site that is periodically inundated by rain, sediment at Cuddie Springs is highly likely to have been moved by water. The depth of the historic well suggests that the ground water level may have been near the level of the Pleistocene layers. Gillespie and David suggest that the upright orientation of an unarticulated
Genyornis
''Genyornis newtoni'', also known as thunder bird and mihirung paringmal (meaning "giant bird"), is an extinct species of large, flightless bird that lived in Australia during the Pleistocene epoch until around 50,000 years ago. Over two met ...
femur
The femur (; ), or thigh bone, is the proximal bone of the hindlimb in tetrapod vertebrates. The head of the femur articulates with the acetabulum in the pelvic bone forming the hip joint, while the distal part of the femur articulates with ...
in the Pleistocene layers at Cuddie Springs might be explained by sediment movement due to water flow. This suggests that the megafauna bones might derive from much older sediments and have been reworked into the stone artefact bearing layers. A more direct link between the stone artefacts and the bones would be cut marks on the bones, but there are "few cut marks on any bones" at Cuddie Springs.
Evidence favour of an intact Pleistocene deposit comes from analysis of
rare-earth element
The rare-earth elements (REE), also called the rare-earth metals or (in context) rare-earth oxides or sometimes the lanthanides (yttrium and scandium are usually included as rare earths), are a set of 17 nearly-indistinguishable lustrous silve ...
s (REE) in the megafauna bones. The REE contents of the bones suggests that each depositional unit contains fauna with a discrete chemical signature and, therefore, a discrete and distinct postdepositional history, arguing against any postdepositional movement and mixing of bone between stratigraphic horizons. Gillespie and Brook comment that this still does not exclude an off-site origin of the bones (i.e. death of the animal) and subsequent fluvial transportation to Cuddie Springs. Field et al. (2006) dispute the proposal that flood movement caused the combination of megafauna and stone artefacts. They report that the sediments enclosing the bones and stones are fine-grained silts and clays resulting from a low-energy flow of water. They argue that if floods were responsible then larger sediments such as sands and gravels would have been found also.
The possibility of mixed Pleistocene deposits is also suggested by some interpretations of the chronology of the site, a third focus of the critiques (figure 6). So far, there are 20
radiocarbon date
Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon.
The method was dev ...
s and seven
luminescence dates published for Cuddie Springs. Statistical analysis by Gillespie and Brook (2006) of the 16 radiocarbon dates from the Pleistocene layers (ranging from 28 to 33,000 years ago) suggest that they do not increase in age as depth increases. They interpret this to mean that the sediments have been disturbed since they were first deposited. The luminescence dates also suggest mixing, with Roberts et al. (2001) finding that the sediments sampled for dating have multiple
palaeodose populations, suggesting that sediments in the same sample were deposited at different times, rather than all at the same time.
As mentioned above, the megafauna bones contain undetectable amounts of protein, so direct dating of the bones has so far been unsuccessful.
The uniqueness of archaeological and palaeontological finds from Cuddie Springs and its unusual stratigraphy have attracted detailed critiques that cast doubt on the integrity of the human-megafauna coexistence. Despite these problems, Cuddie Springs is uniquely significant as a major focus of research into the question of how the Australian megafauna became extinct.
References
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External links
"Cuddie Springs Archaeological Site, New South Wales" Australian Museum
The Australian Museum is a heritage-listed museum at 1 William Street, Sydney central business district, New South Wales, Australia. It is the oldest museum in Australia,Design 5, 2016, p.1 and the fifth oldest natural history museum in the ...
Why did Australia's giant marsupials go extinct?by Judith Furby, December 1996
Archaeological sites in New South Wales
Pleistocene paleontological sites of Australia