Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Real History: Lost ancient colony off coast of Australia that hundreds of thousands once called home discovered

This is a sensationalist article that vaguely implies the discovery of some kind of Atlantis but the reality is that this part of the world was indeed dry land until the floods started and there is now more evidence of people living in these now submerged areas. Hopefully these kinds of discoveries will lead to more archaeology in these kinds of locations and the acceptance that a lot of human history happened along coastlines that are now under the sea.

Lost ancient colony off coast of Australia that hundreds of thousands once called home discovered

Various artifacts and signs of human life were discovered on the northwest shelf of Sahul, located off the coast of the northern region of Kimberley on a landmass that connects to New Guinea, according to a study in Quaternary Science Reviews.

The full research article: Sea level rise drowned a vast habitable area of north-western Australia driving long-term cultural change

Conclusion from the article:

It is clear that the temptation to ignore the continental shelf margins of Late Pleistocene Sahul in debates of early peopling and expansion carries the risk of both oversimplifying and misunderstanding important elements of this period of history. Our analysis indicates the Northwest Shelf was a large habitable landscape that connected the now-separated ancient archaeological landscapes of the Kimberley and Arnhem Land. Reconstructing the palaeoecology of these landscapes in sophisticated ways remains an important goal for future research to understand the potential lifeways of the First Australians. The appearance of new and distinctive rock art styles in the Kimberley and Arnhem Land coincides with major shelf-drowning events and a noticeable increase in stone artefact discard across both regions. We interpret this as the retreat of human populations from the Northwest Shelf as sea levels rose. Now submerged continental margins clearly played an important role in early human expansions across the world. The rise in undersea archaeology in Australia will contribute to a growing worldwide picture of early human migration and the impact of climate change on Late Pleistocene human populations.