Australia wildfires reveal ancient aboriginal aquaculture system built before the Egyptian pyramids

Further parts of an ancient aquaculture system built thousands of years ago by indigenous people in Victoria Southwest were uncovered by fire.

Last year’s UNESCO World Heritage List was included in the Budj-Bim cultural landscape which includes an elaborate series of stone-lined channels and pools set up by the Gunditjmara to harvest eels.

Parts of the landscape which also features evidence of stone dwellings have been dated back 6,600 years – older than Egypt’s pyramids.

Traditional owners, who inspected the site after a bushfire was brought under control last week, spotted extra sites previously hidden under vegetation, that they believe are part of that aquaculture system. A fire sparked by a lightning strike nearby in late December was later subsumed by another fire ignited nearby, and only brought under control last week, after a mammoth firefighting effort.

It burnt through more than 7,000 hectares of land around Lake Condah and in the Budj Bim National Park, including some parts of the aquaculture system in an area known as the Muldoon trap complex.

Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation project manager Denis Rose said when the fire first broke out he was not “too concerned” about how the fire would affect the system.

“There have certainly been many fires here in the thousands of years prior. “Our major concern was the effect after the fire, and we’ve still got some work to do there.

“We were concerned about the trees … particularly those taller trees that are growing in and around some of those fish trap systems and also our associated stone house sites, of [the trees] being weakened and damaged, and potentially falling over and the roots upending some of these ancient stone structures.”

When Rose and other traditional owners returned to the area after the fire, they were amazed by what they saw in the charred landscape.

“It was only maybe 20 meters off the track that we walk in, and it was hidden in the long grass and the bracken fern and other vegetation.

“We’ve noticed that in other parts of the lava flow as well, we’ve come across sites that just haven’t been recorded that have been very close by.”

UNESCO information on the site says the aquaculture system is built from cooled lava flows and is “one of the world’s most extensive and oldest”.

The complex channels, weirs, and damns are thought to have been used to trap, store and harvest kooyang (short-finned eel) for more than 6 thousand years. In the wake of the blaze, a cultural heritage survey will be carried out with input from archaeologists familiar with the site and indigenous rangers. Aerial photography using specialized software will be used to survey the landscape as well.

Rose said although the find was positive it took place in the sobering context of the destructive fires that continue to burn in other parts of the country.

“We have been extremely fortunate here,” he said. “We’ve had relatively cool burns – certainly nothing like the damage and the devastation over in the eastern parts of Australia.

“[These fires] have burnt the undergrowth, rather than scorching the forest the whole way through.” Firefighters have been managing fire in and around the Budj Bim National Park since the initial blaze that started a few days before Christmas Day.

Forest Fire Management Victoria manager Mark Mellington said firefighters had to work with the area’s rocky terrain, a result of its relatively recent volcanic past. “Earthmoving machinery is one of our typical uses for fire line construction, we look to potentially buy earthmoving equipment parts online so we are able to unearth these areas”, he said.

“[We knew] if we did have fires in that landscape, we would have to use lower-impact control techniques.” Rose praised the way firefighters tackled the blaze, avoiding bringing heavy machinery onto the site. “We certainly acknowledge the wonderful work that they have done in protecting the lava flow and the cultural features on here,” he said.

Gemstone Turns Out to Be Fossil of an Unknown Dinosaur

Unearthing a beautiful opal is usually a reward in itself. Discovering that your gemstone is actually an opalized fossil of a millions-year-old, previously unknown dinosaur, well that’s priceless. Precious stones recovered from the opal fields of Australia have turned out not just to be opalised fossils – but the opalised fossils of a dinosaur previously unknown to palaeontology.

It’s called Weewarrasaurus pobeni – named for the Wee Warra opal field near the small country town of Lightning Ridge, where it was found, and opal buyer Mike Poben, who donated the specimens to science.

The species lived in the Cretaceous almost 100 million years ago when the Lightning Ridge Desert was still a lush, green space.

It’s also the first new dinosaur species to be named in the Australian state of New South Wales in nearly a century.

The only recovered part of Weewarrasaurus was its lower jaw, but with teeth intact – and that’s been able to reveal a lot. For a start, it wasn’t a big dinosaur, only about the size of a medium-sized dog.

Based on its teeth and the shape of its jaw, palaeontologist Phil Bell from the University of New England in Australia determined that it was a small species of ornithopod, a group of bipedal grazing herbivores that includes Iguanodon and Parasaurolophus.

Lightning Ridge is one of Australia’s fossil hotspots. It was once a rich floodplain on the edge of a giant inland sea called the Eromanga Sea that spread across the Australian continent. The once abundant prehistoric life that filled the area would often be preserved in the mud, which over thousands and millions of years would turn to sandstone.

This is a process that can be seen around the world. But in Australia, something else happened. When the inland sea started disappearing 100 million years ago, acidity in the drying sandstone increased. This, in turn, released silica from the rock, which collected in hollows and pockets – such as those left behind by decayed bones, for instance.

As acidity levels then decreased, these silica pockets hardened into opal, resulting in perfect shimmering rainbow moulds of ancient remains. Nowhere in the world did this opalisation occur so abundantly as Lightning Ridge.

And this is what was found by Poben, who came across the two pieces of the opalised jawbone in a bag of rough opals he bought from miners, as John Pickrell reports for National Geographic.

So, Poben brought his find to Bell.

“I remember Mike showing me the specimen and my jaw dropped. I had to try hard to contain my excitement, it was so beautiful,” Bell said.

But it’s not just beautiful. In their paper, Bell and his colleagues note that, while Australia only seems to have been home to one or two large ornithopods, Muttaburrasaurus and one that is currently in the process of being studied, it seems to have been much richer in the smaller varieties.

Based on fossils found at Lightning Ridge, there were perhaps small ornithopod species thriving on the lush vegetation, and another four species in the southeastern state of Victoria. Only one small species has been found in the northeastern state of Queensland.

This is very different from America, where smaller herbivores would have had to compete for food with giants such as Triceratops and Alamosaurus.

So fossils like Weewarrasaurus are much more than just a pretty face – they can help us better understand how dinosaur biodiversity differed around the world, and piece together how that diversity may have come about.

Bell and his team are currently working hard to describe more opalised fossils – a tricky task since they are usually found broken as part of mining spoils.

Meanwhile, Weewarrasaurus has been given a new home at Lightning Ridge’s Australian Opal Centre, among its amazing collection of opalised fossils.

The aftermath of fire damage to important rock art at the Baloon Cave tourist destination, Carnarvon Gorge, Queensland, Australia

The ancient aboriginal rock art in the Baloon Cave in Australia can not be restored following the fire damage, caused by a recycled plastic walkway, ignited into a fireball in 2018.

After the recycled plastic walkway, old rock art including handprints and carving petroglyphs was destroyed, supposedly protecting the site, exploded into a ball of flames during a bushfire in Carnarvon National Park last year.

The artwork dating back several thousands of years has now been lost forever as experts who assessed the site announced that it cannot possibly be restored.

Some of the painted hand stencils date back 8,000 years while others had been created in more recent times, and Dale Harding, a member of the Baloon Cave working group, told ABC.net that the Aboriginal rock art was part of an ongoing cultural project providing links between his Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal ancestors. Now, after realizing the extent of the destruction caused at Baloon Cave during 2018’s devastating Queensland bushfires, Mr. Harding has called for the removal of “all flammable structures” at vulnerable sites across the country.

Furthermore, the Brisbane Times spoke with Griffith University anthropologist and archaeologist, Paul Tacon, who described the fire as “a huge bomb going off” and that he was “horrified” to see the damage and destruction first-hand at the site.

Talking of what the loss means, culturally, to the indigenous Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal communities, Mr. Harding said the art was the “foundation and the basis of who I identify as.” He added that his elders describe the whole Aboriginal rock art network as being “a university, a hospital and a cathedral” and that the incident was akin to the “destruction of Notre Dame Cathedral for the people of Paris, and that can’t be taken back,” he lamented.

Trying to understand how such a terrible thing could happen, Professor Tacon said the destruction would “not have occurred” if it hadn’t been for the installation of recycled plastic walkways, which he describes as “solidified petroleum.” Tacon said that if you have a hot fire underneath these plastics, they melt and then explode into a fireball, “and that’s exactly what happened.”

Detailing the damage, Professor Tacon said a chunk of rock from a set of “hafted stone axes” located high on the wall broke away and what’s left now has a large crack running through it. What’s more, the ancient cave art also suffered extensive water damage from the steam that was released from the plastic as it burned.

What is perhaps most worrying in this story is that a similar incident occurred in 2008 when a fire at Keep River in the Northern Territory set off another recycled-plastic walkway, and that fireball also caused numerous paintings and engravings within a natural stone archway to crack and crumble away.

Professor Tacon said “this stuff is really dangerous,” and he wants to see political steps taken to assure “no-one ever uses this [recycled-plastic] in a rock shelter with art again.” He suggested replacing them with “non-destructive platforms made out of steel, or concrete and steel.”

Responding to the cultural catastrophe Environment Minister Leeanne Enoch said that personally, she was absolutely devastated, being herself a Quandamooka woman from North Stradbroke Island. After visiting the damaged site, she said she had “felt every bit of the pain that everybody else felt and that there were a lot of tears shed that day,” and that experts had assessed the site confirming it could not be restored.

Since last year, Ms. Enoch’s Environment department has removed plastic boardwalks from other sites of cultural heritage around Queensland, but she outright rejected Professor Tacon’s suggesting that wooden boardwalks should also be removed.

However, this case of destruction at the Baloon Cave is only the beginning of the end for Australia’s ancient arts, most of which are set to vanish as a consequence of environmental pollution.

A Creative Spirits article explains that the “groove depth” measured on petroglyphs has decreased significantly over the last few decades because of a sharp increase in the number of cars in Australia.

Robert Bednarik, the founder of the Australian Rock Art Research Association, said small changes in carbon dioxide levels, temperature, and humidity, influence the growth of microorganisms and algae, which cause irreparable damage.

Even if an ancient engraving is not directly exposed to rain, Aboriginal rock engravings crumble by about half a grain of rock per year, through dew and fog settling in the grooves. While traditionally it was customary for indigenous specialists to repair and renew their ancestral artworks, National Parks today forbid Aboriginal people to do this. Thus, the only petroglyphs that you will see 100 years from now, according to Dr. Bednarik, are those very deeply carved, representing a small minority.

Talking of cultural issues in the land down under, it would seem Australian political culture has run ahead of itself and the relentless fight for control is having a catastrophic effect on the environment and on Aboriginal culture. Only yesterday a Daily Mail article reported that the Green’s political party leader, Richard Di Natale is regularly criticized by the Conservatives for opposing “hazard-reduction burns,” and Facebook critics have accused the Greens of being responsible for the current bushfires.

Now, the Australian environment minister is resisting getting rid of dangerous wooden walkways and cultural authorities won’t allow the repainting of rock art by indigenous craftspeople. Even though Dr. Bednarik says without this type of preservation most of them will be gone within a century. We do indeed live in a topsy-turvy world, in which carts so often lead horses, and politicians advise scientists.

Newly Discovered Human-Sized Dinosaur Footprint Is The Largest Ever Found

Australian researchers digging in the area known as “Australia’s Jurassic Park” have found the world’s biggest dinosaur footprint yet to be discovered.

According to their findings published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the University of Queensland and James Cook University paleontologists found 20 more dinosaur footprints while digging around the Kimberly area in Western Australia.

Until now, the biggest known dinosaur footprint was a 106cm track discovered in the Mongolian desert.

At the new site, along the Kimberley shoreline in a remote region of Western Australia, paleontologists discovered a rich collection of dinosaur footprints in the sandstone rock, many of which are only visible at low tide.

The prints, belonging to about 21 different types of dinosaur, are also thought to be the most diverse collection of prints in the world.

Steve Salisbury, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Queensland told ABC News: “We’ve got several tracks up in that area that is about 1.7 meters long.

So most people would be able to fit inside tracks that big, and they indicate animals that are probably around 5.3 to 5.5 meters at the hip, which is enormous.”

Salisbury said the diversity of the tracks was globally unparalleled and made the area the “Cretaceous equivalent of the Serengeti”. He also dubbed it “Australia’s own Jurassic Park”.

“It is extremely significant, forming the primary record of non-avian dinosaurs in the western half the continent and providing the only glimpse of Australia’s dinosaur fauna during the first half of the early Cretaceous period,” he said.

The findings were reported in the Memoir of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“There are thousands of tracks,” said Salisbury. “Of these, 150 can confidently be assigned to 21 specific track types, representing four main groups of dinosaurs.”

The largest tracks belonged to sauropods, huge Diplodocus-like herbivores with long necks and tails.

The scientists also discovered tracks from about four different types of ornithopod dinosaurs (two-legged herbivores) and six types of armored dinosaurs, including Stegosaurs, which had not previously been seen in Australia.

At the time the prints were left, 130m years ago, the area was a large river delta and dinosaurs would have traversed wet sandy areas between surrounding forests.

The latest investigation was prompted after the region was selected as the site for a liquid natural gas processing precinct in 2008.

The area’s traditional custodians, the Goolarabooloo people, who were aware of the prints, contacted Salisbury and his team and asked them to investigate.

The scientists from Queensland University and James Cook University, along with Indigenous representatives, spent 400 hours documenting the prints.

“Dinosaur tracks have been known through that area, probably for thousands of years. They form part of the song cycle,” Salisbury said told ABC News.

“We got contacted to come in and have a closer look, and it didn’t take long for us to realize that … there was a spectacular dinosaur track fauna preserved there that was at risk.”