PEOPLING

Madjedbebe: First Australians

~65,000 years ago (disputed)

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Last glacial

Sands from a rock shelter in northern Australia date the first Australians to about 65,000 years ago, an age still disputed.

Madjedbebe is a rock shelter in Arnhem Land, in Australia's Northern Territory, whose deepest levels have yielded ground ochre and hafted ground-edge axes. Optical luminescence dating of the sands containing these objects, published in 2017, gives about 65,000 years for the oldest occupation; it applies to the sediment and not to the objects, a distinction that governs the controversy. Access to Australia in any case implied open-sea navigation, out of sight of land, whatever route was followed through the Indonesian archipelago.

Why it matters

No land bridge connected Sahul to the Asian continent, so that the peopling of Australia implies deliberate navigation and numbers sufficient to found a population. The date has implications beyond the site: an arrival at 65,000 years would imply a departure from Africa earlier or faster than the genetic consensus allows, and a prolonged coexistence between the first Australians and the continent's megafauna.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

Optical dating gives 65,000 ± 6,000 years for the oldest occupation. Objections concern stratigraphic integrity: termites and other disturbance may have carried objects down into older sands, in which case the age assigned comes from sediment earlier than the object and is overestimated. Critics further note that no other Australian site confirms this antiquity. The excavators reply that refitted flakes and the integrity of the hearths exclude significant mixing. A minimum age of about 50,000 years is not contested.

Our species’ history as one day

19:02:514 h 57 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day