Skip to comments.Archaeologists find world's oldest axe in Australia
Posted on 05/10/2016 11:24:38 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Archaeologists from The Australian National University (ANU) have unearthed fragments from the edge of the world's oldest-known axe, found in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.
Lead archeologist Professor Sue O'Connor said the axe dates back between 46,000 and 49,000 years, around the time people first arrived on the continent.
"This is the earliest evidence of hafted axes in the world. Nowhere else in the world do you get axes at this date," said Professor O'Connor from the ANU School of Culture, History and Language.
"In Japan such axes appear about 35,000 years ago. But in most countries in the world they arrive with agriculture after 10,000 years ago."
Professor O'Connor said this discovery showed early Aboriginal technology was not as simple as has been previously suggested.
A hafted axe is an axe with a handle attached.
"Australian stone artefacts have often been characterised as being simple. But clearly that's not the case when you have these hafted axes earlier in Australia than anywhere else in the world," she said.
Professor O'Connor said evidence suggests the technology was developed in Australia after people arrived around 50,000 years ago.
"We know that they didn't have axes where they came from. There's no axes in the islands to our north. They arrived in Australia and innovated axes," she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at eurekalert.org ...
An example of a hafted axe similar to the one the unearthed flakes would have come from. [Stuart Hay, ANU.]
Oh, they really do mean an Axe tool, not slang for a guitar.
No sweat - it’s a Craftsman.
I wondered where I left that!
And in related news, America’s oldest battleaxe was found to be resident in Chappaqua, NY. . .
Product labeling was certainly crude back then.
Looks like a rock to me
I got a whole bunch of hatchets in my drive then
A long time age some guy spent hours looking for that.
‘At’s no’ a knife.
I say bogus.
If it was a battle axe, I’d suggest they were describing Hillary Clinton.
They didn’t find an axe as the headline states: they found flakes that they ASSUME came from the manufacture of an axe. Could they be assuming wrongly?
Wonder where the world’s oldest battleaxe is? I have met quite a few, but they were younger. Maybe in contention for the fiercest, but nowhere near the oldest.
Interesting! Thanks for posting it.
And nearby this awesome finding was the world’s oldest severed head.
Used to fight off crocodiles and Megalania, giant 15ft lizards and the Diprotodon wombat and marsupial lion and Dromornis stirtoni - a big mean 10ft bird and Tasmanian Tigers.
Thanks all for the surprisingly numerous replies!
Abstract: More than 85 percent of Australian terrestrial genera with a body mass exceeding 44 kilograms became extinct in the Late Pleistocene. Although most were marsupials, the list includes the large, flightless mihirung Genyornis newtoni. More than 700 dates on Genyornis eggshells from three different climate regions document the continuous presence of Genyornis from more than 100,000 years ago until their sudden disappearance 50,000 years ago, about the same time that humans arrived in Australia. Simultaneous extinction of Genyornis at all sites during an interval of modest climate change implies that human impact, not climate, was responsible. [1/8/99 Pleistocene Extinction of Genyornis newtoni: Human Impact on Australian Megafauna (Gifford H. Miller, John W. Magee, Beverly J. Johnson, Marilyn L. Fogel, Nigel A. Spooner, Malcolm T. McCulloch, Linda K. Ayliffe, Science, Volume 283, Number 5399 Issue of 8 Jan 1999, pp. 205 - 208 )]In Horus, a journal published by the late David Griffard, vol II no 1 (1985), Barry Fell was interviewed. Alas, DG went down in a private plane after the seventh issue. Among other things:
In the middle of Australia there is a group of three or four meteorite craters called the Henley craters. They're like the Arizona meteorite crater -- not so big, but there are several of them -- and, like in Arizona, the land was scattered with pieces of iron meteorite. I think the [inaudible] dating very slow growing desert plants. They believe that the date is about 5000 years ago -- the formation of the craters. The Aboriginal name for this area is the "Place Where The Sun Walked on the Earth" -- they must have seen it!
Does this mean that I’m appropriating their culture
when I split firewood now and I have to stop it?
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