Human occupation of the Kimberley coast of northwest Australia 50,000 years ago

Norman, Kasih; Shipton, Ceri; O’Connor, Sue; Malanali, Wudugu; Collins, Peter L.; Wood, Rachel; Saktura, Wanchese M.; Jacobs, Zenobia

doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2022.107577

Cited by 16 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…Assuming a consistent sedimentation rate through the Pleistocene and no further unconformities, it is possible that the entire 10.5 m deposit could extend back into the middle Pleistocene. Thus, the deposit covers a period that includes substantial climatic change (De Deckker et al , 2019, 2020; Kemp et al , 2019), late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions (Roberts et al , 2001), the earliest known occurrences of humans in Australia (Ward et al , 2017; Clarkson et al , 2017; O'Connell et al , 2018; Norman et al , 2022) and the period immediately leading up to European colonisation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting the late Quaternary fossiliferous infills of Cathedral Cave, Wellington Caves (central eastern New South Wales, Australia)

Fusco

Arnold

Gully

et al. 2023

J Quaternary Science

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The Wellington Caves were the first Australian locality from which Europeans collected and analysed vertebrate fossils. Within this system, Cathedral Cave contains Australia's stratigraphically deepest sequence of fossil‐bearing infill sediments, the age and depositional history of which has been poorly understood. Here we present results from a new excavation of the upper 4.2 m of the deposit, reanalysing the stratigraphy, petrography, sedimentology and geochemistry, and employing optically stimulated luminescence dating, radiocarbon dating and Bayesian age modelling to establish a robust chronology. We recognise 13 sedimentary layers and sublayers in two stratigraphic units. Unit 2 accumulated between 72 000 ± 5000 and 38 000 ± 7000 years ago as sediments and animals entered through a now‐blocked ceiling hole. Accumulation halted for around 30 000 years when the hole closed. Unit 1 accumulated when deposition was reinitiated around 7000 ± 2000 years ago, continuing through to a few hundred years ago. Our chronology refutes earlier dating of the deposit, which suggested that extinct Pleistocene megafauna taxa persisted locally until the Last Glacial Maximum. It confirms the deposit as one of the few in Australia that formed during the interval of major environmental upheaval marked by the arrival of humans, variable climate and the extinction of many megafaunal species.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting the late Quaternary fossiliferous infills of Cathedral Cave, Wellington Caves (central eastern New South Wales, Australia)

Fusco

Arnold

Gully

et al. 2023

J Quaternary Science

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“…Were we to reject this explanation we would still need to account for the near-universal occurrence of scarification and shaving in the ethnographic present somewhere else in the archaeological record. Lithic miniaturization is a pan-African phenomenon (e.g., MacDonald 1997; Mercader and Brooks 2001;Cornelissen 2003;Villa et al 2012;Bousman and Brink 2018), as well as being associated with early Homo sapiens from MIS 3 in Europe (Straus 2002;Slimak et al 2022), the Levant (Belfer-Cohen and Goring-Morris 2002), the Indian subcontinent (Clarkson et al 2018;Wedage et al 2019), the Wallacean islands (Shipton et al 2019(Shipton et al , 2021b, and Australia (Norman et al 2022), so it is a plausible indicator of a widespread late Paleolithic cutting tool function.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Levels of reduction intensity might be regarded as a more direct measure of economic pressure on tool-stone, but these vary widely across the Panga ya Saidi sequence and do not explain the differences in artifact size between the MSA and LSA. In sequences of Homo sapiens occupation spanning tens of millennia from Wallacea and Australia, miniaturization is a feature of the technology from the outset (when presumably pioneer populations were relatively small), and it is maintained across wide variations in site and regional occupation records (Shipton et al 2019;Norman et al 2022), as well as levels of reduction intensity (Shipton et al 2021b). It may be that the higher occupation intensities associated with miniaturized lithics at some African sites are a consequence rather than a cause of miniaturization.…”

Section: Abstractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Miniaturization and Abstraction in the Later Stone Age

Shipton

2023

Biol Theory

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This article offers some hypotheses to explain Later Stone Age lithic miniaturization: the systematic creation of small stone flakes on the finest-grained materials. Fundamentally, this phenomenon appears to represent the prioritization of stone tool sharpness over longevity, and a disposable mode of using stone tools. Ethnographic evidence from Australasia, the Andaman Islands, and Africa is used to suggest some specific functions for miniaturized lithics, as well as their relationship to other aspects of Later Stone Age material culture, including ochre crayons, shell beads, and notched bones. Miniaturized lithic functions are hypothesized to have a common basis in the cognitive capacity for abstraction: having ideas about ideas. The technological and social affordances of abstraction may have given later Homo sapiens significant adaptive advantages over other members of our genus.

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“…D e measurement and single-grain D e distributions Single-grain OSL measurements and D e determinations were made using the SAR procedure, experimental conditions, and equipment adopted previously for Australian quartz (e.g., Wood et al, 2016;Clarkson et al, 2017;Norman et al, 2022). Grains were stimulated using a focused green (532 nm) laser for 2 s at 125 • C following a preheat of 260 • C for 10 s in the natural and regenerative dose cycles and 160 • C for 5 s in each test dose cycle.…”

Section: Osl Sample Collection and Preparationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A new OSL dose model to account for post-depositional mixing of sediments

Yates¹,

Aandahl²,

Brook³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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In applications of optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating to unconsolidated sediments, the burial age of a sample of grains is estimated using statistical models of the distribution of the experimentally determined equivalent doses of the grains, together with estimates of the environmental dose rate. For grains that have been vertically mixed after deposition (e.g., due to bioturbation), existing dose models may fail to appropriately account for the complexity of the mixing process, thus producing inaccurate age estimates of the original time of deposition of the `native' grains in any particular sample (usually the quantity of most interest). Here we introduce a new dose model, the asymmetric Laplacian mixture model (ALMM), developed for vertically mixed samples with single-grain dose distributions. The approach is based on a continuous statistical mixture that models the displacement of grains in both upward and downward directions. The central dose of the native grains in each sediment sample is estimated by the ALMM, as well as the parameters associated with overdispersion of single-grain dose distributions and the (modelled) mixing process. Using Bayesian methodology, we apply the model to two series of vertically contiguous samples collected at the site of Nawarla Gabarnmang in northern Australia. Independent age estimates obtained from radiocarbon dating of charcoal fragments support the OSL ages for the native grains estimated by the ALMM. Moreover, our study includes sensitivity analyses that show the model is robust to variation in the experimental error of the OSL data. The ALMM is introduced in the context of compound Gaussian distributions, a broadly encompassing statistical framework that includes many of the most commonly used dose models. This unifying and accessible perspective on the statistical modelling of dose distributions will support practitioners in selecting an appropriate model for samples affected by post-depositional mixing, and hopefully stimulate further theoretical developments. A new R rstanosl package is provided that fits the ALMM and other commonly used dose models using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo methods via the Stan programming language.

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Human occupation of the Kimberley coast of northwest Australia 50,000 years ago

Cited by 16 publications

References 79 publications

Revisiting the late Quaternary fossiliferous infills of Cathedral Cave, Wellington Caves (central eastern New South Wales, Australia)

Revisiting the late Quaternary fossiliferous infills of Cathedral Cave, Wellington Caves (central eastern New South Wales, Australia)

Miniaturization and Abstraction in the Later Stone Age

A new OSL dose model to account for post-depositional mixing of sediments

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