So much of what is touted as ‘history’ by the Australian left is complete and utter bollocks. Yet, apparently simply by dint of endlessly bellowed repetition, they’ve convinced themselves that they’re unshakeably true. Whether it’s that the 1967 referendum ‘gave Aborigines citizenship’, or that ‘Aborigines invented agriculture and democracy’, there’s no thoroughly debunked bullshit that the left don’t constantly try and pass off as ‘fact’.
A recent one is the ‘world’s oldest living culture – 65,000 years!’ claim. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, towering bullshit on stilts. Not a single Aboriginal Australian alive today lives an authentically pre-1788 lifestyle. If any cultures can authentically claim to be ‘oldest’, it would those of Africans like the San, whose ancestors never left the human birthplace.
Even if the claim is that the culture of today is a carry-over from the past, the same is true of literally every single culture on Earth.
So, where did this nonsensical meme come from?
Archaeologists recovered human-made artifacts, including stone tools and ocher "crayons," from the Madjedbebe rock shelter and published their findings in a 2017 study. One difficulty in dating the artifacts, however, was the copious amount of sand on the floor of the rock shelter, which can move easily and cause artifacts to fall farther down, making them look older than they are.
Although the research team took steps to counteract this issue and landed on a 65,000-year-old date, Madjedbebe's occupation timing is still uncertain because it is by far the oldest archaeological site in Australia, making it an outlier.
And heavily criticised in the scientific literature.
But there are other obvious challenges that falsify the claim, one of the devastating comes from the burgeoning field of Ancient DNA (aDNA). As I’ve reported before, this new field is upsetting a great many dearly held apple carts, especially around issues of race.
Now, it is showing that the ‘65,000 year’ claim is simply impossible.
All because of the Neanderthals.
As is now well-known, homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred in Europe. This interbreeding took place in a very narrow window of deep time: between 50,500 and 43,500 years ago. From this prehistoric group-quickie came the traces of Neanderthal DNA that permeates the genomes of all humans outside Africa.
Including Aborigines.
The implication should be immediately obvious.
This means the earliest Homo sapiens in Australia had some Neanderthal roots – and those roots can’t go back much earlier than 50,000 years ago.
Bear in mind that the spread of humans across the globe was not a quick process. People didn’t simply pack up their sticks and stones in Africa and keep moving until they got their feet wet. The pattern of human expansion would have been groups of hunter-gatherers reaching a population level unable to be supported by the territory their families/clans/tribes had occupied for generations. So small bands would have dispersed or been driven out to the next unoccupied hunting grounds. Expansion across whole continents would have taken tens of thousands of years.
Eventually, they would have spread across Eurasia to the region dubbed ‘Sahul’.
Researchers interested in the earliest humans in Australia have focused primarily on archaeological sites in southeast Asia and Oceania, broadly across the modern borders of Indonesia, Australia and various islands, also known as the paleocontinent Sahul […]
Archaeological evidence of human occupation in Sahul largely lines up with the genetic evidence, Allen and O'Connell wrote in their study. All archaeological sites except one have been dated to between 43,000 and 54,000 years ago, meaning humans could have mixed with Neanderthals in Eurasia and then headed east.
Where they would have eventually encountered the formidable barrier of deep sea water known as the Wallace Line. Eventually, evidently, that barrier was breached. But, on the newest aDNA evidence, it couldn’t possibly have been 65,000 years ago.
Remember, folks: Follow The Science. No matter where it leads.
