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Groundbreaking archaeological discovery in Australia: An Aboriginal ritual is said to have been performed in the Stone Age. What exactly does that mean?
Melbourne – How did people behave in the Stone Age? Archaeologists can usually only speculate about this. But now experts in Australia have found evidence of an indigenous ritual that was apparently practiced continuously for 500 generations – from 12,000 years ago until the 19th century. This was the result of a study.
Sensational finds from 12,000 years ago in a cave in the Australian state of Victoria
There have been remarkable finds in a cave in the southeast of the country. Wooden artefacts dating back 11,000 to 12,000 years were uncovered. Study author Bruno David from Monash University said in a press release: “Nowhere else on earth has archaeological evidence for a very specific cultural practice been traced back so far before.” In Lower Saxony too A significant historical discovery was recently made.
The results of the study were published in the Zpublication Nature Human Behaviour published and shed light on the rich cultural heritage of the GunaiKurnai – an Australian Aboriginal nation that is one of the oldest living cultures in the world. The excavations were carried out at the invitation of the Aboriginal elders of the GunaiKurnai in Cloggs Cave in the state of Victoria.
Wooden artifacts from Australia indicate Aboriginal ritual
Two miniature fireplaces were uncovered, each containing a single shaped stick made of casuarina wood. Chemical analysis of both sticks showed that they had been coated with animal or human fat and dated back to around the last ice age.
However, the sticks, which are now Australia’s oldest known wooden artefacts, were not used for cooking or heating. They are said to have been used to practice a particular ritual by medicine men with the title of “Mulla-Mullung”, which was also described by the ethnographer Alfred Howitt at the end of the 19th century.
Ritual “Mulla-Mullung” served to heal the sick
And how did this ritual work? According to Howitt, it involved attaching something belonging to a sick person to the end of a throwing stick that had been smeared with human or kangaroo fat. The throwing stick was then stuck into the ground at an angle before a fire was lit underneath. The Mulla-Mullung would then chant the sick person’s name and when the stick fell, the spell was complete. Howitt also named the type of wood casuarina.
According to study author David, everything fits together: the sticks were easily burned using miniature fires, the type of wood was right and the fat on the sticks was right. The practice has therefore probably survived 500 generations. However, the ritual is no longer practiced by the Aborigines today. When white settlers came, the locals were driven from their land and this part of the culture was lost.
99 percent of the earth’s population was also lost: 800,000 years ago, almost all humans died out. (cgsc)
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