Warratyi is the site of a prehistoric
rock shelter
A rock shelter (also rockhouse, crepuscular cave, bluff shelter, or abri) is a shallow cave-like opening at the base of a bluff or cliff. In contrast to solutional caves (karst), which are often many miles long, rock shelters are almost alway ...
in the
Flinders Ranges
The Flinders Ranges are the largest mountain range in South Australia, which starts about north of Adelaide. The ranges stretch for over from Port Pirie to Lake Callabonna.
The Adnyamathanha people are the Aboriginal group who have inhabi ...
in
South Australia
South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a state in the southern central part of Australia. It covers some of the most arid parts of the country. With a total land area of , it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories ...
. Located around north of
Adelaide
Adelaide ( ) is the capital city of South Australia, the state's largest city and the fifth-most populous city in Australia. "Adelaide" may refer to either Greater Adelaide (including the Adelaide Hills) or the Adelaide city centre. The dem ...
and about inland, it has been identified as the oldest known site of human habitation in inland
Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...
.
Newspapers reported that this rock shelter was discovered by chance in 2011 by a local resident who stumbled upon it while looking for somewhere to go to the toilet. Researchers found thousands of artefacts and bone fragments, which enabled them to date the shelter's occupation to a number of periods between 49,000 and 10,000 years ago. The finds include the earliest evidence in Australia of the development of
bone
A bone is a Stiffness, rigid Organ (biology), organ that constitutes part of the skeleton in most vertebrate animals. Bones protect the various other organs of the body, produce red blood cell, red and white blood cells, store minerals, provid ...
and
stone-axe technology, the use of
ochre
Ochre ( ; , ), or ocher in American English, is a natural clay earth pigment, a mixture of ferric oxide and varying amounts of clay and sand. It ranges in colour from yellow to deep orange or brown. It is also the name of the colours produced ...
, and interaction with
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 ...
such as''
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 ...
''.
Discovery
The site is located in the ancestral lands of the
Adnyamathanha
The Adnyamathanha (Pronounced: ) are a contemporary Aboriginal Australian people of the northern Flinders Ranges, South Australia, formed as an aggregate of several distinct peoples. Strictly speaking the ethnonym Adnyamathanha was an alternativ ...
, an
Indigenous Australian
Indigenous Australians or Australian First Nations are people with familial heritage from, and membership in, the ethnic groups that lived in Australia before British colonisation. They consist of two distinct groups: the Aboriginal peoples ...
people. It lies in a gorge at the southern end of the
Lake Eyre basin
The Lake Eyre basin ( ) is a drainage basin that covers just under one-sixth of all Australia. It is the largest endorheic basin in Australia and amongst the largest in the world, covering about , including much of inland Queensland, large porti ...
in the northern Flinders Ranges.
Its discovery came about by chance during an exploratory trip into the Flinders Range by Clifford Coulthard, an Adnyamathanha elder, and Giles Hamm, an archaeologist from
La Trobe University
La Trobe University is a public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Its main campus is located in the suburb of Bundoora. The university was established in 1964, becoming the third university in the state of Victoria an ...
.
While Coulthard was searching for a place to go to the toilet, the two men found a spring surrounded by rock art and a soot-blackened fissure in the rock nearby.
They realised immediately that the soot indicated that the fissure had been used as a shelter where fires had been lit.
The fissure is located about above a creek bed. It is approximately wide and extends to a depth of about .
Finds
Between 2011 and 2014, a team of researchers led by Hamm excavated the shelter to a depth of . They found over 4,300 artefacts including bone fragments from sixteen species of mammal and one reptile,
as well as eggs from emus
and an extinct giant bird, ''
Genyornis newtoni
''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 ...
''.
The animal remains included bones from the extinct ''Diprotodon'', a
wombat
Wombats are short-legged, muscular quadrupedal marsupials that are native to Australia. They are about in length with small, stubby tails and weigh between . All three of the extant species are members of the family Vombatidae. They are adap ...
-like creature the size of a
rhinoceros
A rhinoceros (; ; ), commonly abbreviated to rhino, is a member of any of the five extant species (or numerous extinct species) of odd-toed ungulates in the family Rhinocerotidae. (It can also refer to a member of any of the extinct species o ...
, which had probably been killed and brought to the shelter to be cooked and eaten.
Most of the of bones discovered were probably from a single species, the
yellow-footed rock-wallaby
The yellow-footed rock-wallaby (''Petrogale xanthopus''), formerly known as the ring-tailed rock-wallaby, is a member of the macropod family (the marsupial family that includes the kangaroos, wallabies, tree-kangaroos, and wallaroos).
Descripti ...
.
The artefacts included pieces of
gypsum
Gypsum is a soft sulfate mineral composed of calcium sulfate dihydrate, with the chemical formula . It is widely mined and is used as a fertilizer and as the main constituent in many forms of plaster, blackboard or sidewalk chalk, and drywall. ...
pigment, hafted and stone tools, and bone needles including the oldest bone tool so far found in Australia. The shelter also provided evidence of the earliest known ochre usage in Australia and
south-east Asia
Southeast Asia, also spelled South East Asia and South-East Asia, and also known as Southeastern Asia, South-eastern Asia or SEA, is the geographical south-eastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of mainland ...
.
Fragments of fibrous plant material found at the site may be the remains of nets, which the occupants may have used to catch the fast-moving wallabies.
Analysis
Dating was carried out through a combination of
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 ...
(analysing the depth of artefacts),
carbon dating
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 ...
of organic artefacts and the use of single-grain
optically stimulated luminescence
In physics, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) is a method for measuring doses from ionizing radiation. It is used in at least two applications:
* Luminescence dating of ancient materials: mainly geological sediments and sometimes fired pott ...
to date quartz grains. This revealed that the shelter had been used in a number of phases over tens of thousands of years, with the earliest evidence of habitation 49,000 years ago. It appears to have been used particularly intensively about 40,000 years ago, but usage declined around 35,000–24,000 years ago during a period of extreme aridity in South Australia. Another relatively intensive period of usage occurred from around 17,000 years ago, with the last evidence of usage dating to around 10,000 years before the present day.
The discoveries have shed new light on the
human colonisation of Australia by the ancestors of today's Indigenous Australians. The first Australians are thought to have migrated by boat to northern Australia about 50,000 years ago. They then spread all the way around the coasts of the continent within possibly as little as 2,000 years. It had previously been thought that they took much longer to diffuse into Australia's arid interior, as the next earliest known evidence of interior settlement, at
Puritjarra in western central Australia, is dated to 11,000 years after the oldest of the Warratyi finds. However, the discoveries at Warratyi suggest that the interior diffusion happened much earlier than that. It is possible that humans migrated into the interior at a very early date by following river systems and settled around inland springs such as the one at Warratyi. Alternatively, they may have cut directly through the centre of the country.
References
{{Navbox prehistoric caves
Flinders Ranges
History of Indigenous Australians
Rock shelters in Australia