Archaeologists discovered 12,000-year-old artifacts, including two distinct wooden sticks rubbed with animal or human fat, along with well-preserved hearths and tools, in Cloggs Cave located on the ancestral lands of the Gunaikurnai Aboriginal people in Australia.
The artifacts provide evidence of a ritual practice involving burning fat-smeared sticks, which may be one of the oldest continuously practiced traditions passed down by Indigenous Australians for around 500 generations.
The ritual was documented by ethnographer Alfred Howitt in the late 1800s and involved a healer or "mulla-mullung" from an Aboriginal community in Victoria, who would sing the name of the person needing healing or cursing, and the spell would be cast when the stick fell. This practice was similar to other tribes using pointed bones for spells.
Archaeological evidence of rituals is rare and has often not been preserved over long periods, making the discovery significant.
Radiocarbon dating revealed the sticks to be between 10,870 and 12,440 years old, making them the oldest ritual objects found in Australia.
The lack of food remains near the fireplaces suggests the sticks were central to a ritual passed down over generations, exclusively for ritual purposes from at least 25,000 years ago until 1,600 years ago.
The excavations in 2020 were led by the local Aboriginal community, represented by the Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation (GLaWAC), in collaboration with archaeologists. The findings, including the sticks and crystals used in rituals, were discovered in a 50 cm x 50 cm section of the cave and have been published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
The researchers concluded that the cave was used for rituals rather than as a living space, suggesting a continuous tradition of ceremonies over thousands of years.
Sources: Live Science, O Globo, La Vanguardia, Yahoo News, ABC News, Courrier International, ABC, Postimees, Grenzwissenschaft-Aktuell, Stuttgarter Zeitung
This article was written in collaboration with Generative AI news company Alchemiq.
