PEOPLING

Crossing to Australia

~65,000 years ago (disputed)

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Last glacial

At Madjedbebe rock shelter, in northern Australia, people were grinding ochre and seeds and hafting ground-edge axes by about 65,000 years ago, by optical dating of the sands around their tools. Reaching Australia meant crossing open sea beyond sight of land, whatever the route through the islands: the first ocean voyage in the human story that we can be sure was deliberate.

Why it matters

No land bridge ever ran to Sahul. Somebody built craft, loaded families, and steered into water with no far shore visible, and enough of them arrived to found a continent's population. The date is fought over because much hangs on it: if people reached Australia at 65,000 years, the expansion out of Africa was earlier or faster than the genetic consensus, and the first Australians may have shared the land with megafauna far longer than assumed.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

Optical dating at Madjedbebe gives 65,000 +/- 6,000 years for the oldest occupation. Critics argue termites and other disturbance moved artefacts downward into older sand, and that no other Australian site yet confirms such antiquity; the excavators reply that refitting artefacts and intact hearths rule out major mixing. A conservative floor of about 50,000 years is safe; the 65,000 reading remains the published best estimate.

Sources

1. Clarkson et al. (2017), Nature · Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years agodoi:10.1038/nature22968
2. Williams et al. (2020), Geoarchaeology · Identifying disturbance in archaeological sites in tropical northern Australia: implications for previously proposed 65,000-year continental occupation datedoi:10.1002/gea.21822
3. Clarkson et al. (2018), Australian Archaeology · Reply to comments on Clarkson et al. (2017) 'Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago'doi:10.1080/03122417.2018.1462884

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