Ancient Aboriginal Ritual in Australia Could Be Part of the Humanity’s Oldest Tradition

Amaze Lab

In a cave in Australia archeologists have revisited the site of an ancient GunaiKurnai Aboriginal ritual. They lived in the area some 10,000 years ago, but this cave was not lived in, it was used for an ancient and long-serving ritual.

Transcript

00:00In a cave in Australia, archaeologists have revisited the site of an ancient Gunai-Kurnai

00:08aboriginal ritual.

00:10The peoples lived in the area some 10,000 years ago, but this cave was not lived in,

00:14despite having been discovered in the 1800s.

00:17The cave and the remains of an ancient fire within it were not well understood.

00:21The peoples were believed to live secular lives, but now archaeologists say the fire

00:25was part of what could be an extremely long-running and continuous ritual.

00:29There are two nearly identical fireplaces within the cave, each built around a thousand

00:33years apart.

00:34However, the sediment inside the cave suggests they were constructed 10,000 to 12,000 years

00:39ago, at the end of the last ice age.

00:41The traditions of the Gunai-Kurnai are exclusively oral in nature, shared by generations for

00:46at least 10,000 years, but their histories were not properly or respectfully investigated

00:51until recently, with the archaeologists concluding that these findings are not about the memory

00:56of ancestral practices, but of the passing down of knowledge in virtually unchanged form

01:00from one generation to the next over some 500 generations.

01:05Some of these oral traditions even document the end of the ice age, when giant bodies

01:09of ice melted and flooded the land bridge between Australia and the mainland some 12,000

01:14years ago.

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