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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