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00:08Tsoy .
00:10Oh!
00:12Where did you get a scarıyorsun?
00:16Go!
00:19Okay.
00:20What are you doing?
00:23I'm going to go.
00:51For over 50,000 years, our people have lived in Greater Australia, leaving traces of their
01:01story everywhere they went.
01:06By 30,000 years ago, they were flourishing in every corner of the continent.
01:15But they were about to be challenged like never before.
01:23A 10,000 year ice age brought glaciers to the mountain ranges and transformed Greater Australia
01:32into 90% desert.
01:37This is the story of how people survived the longest and most severe drought in human
01:45history.
02:06Hidden deep in Arnhem Land in Northern Australia is the longest historical record of life
02:13on the planet.
02:18Ronald Lamy Lamy's family were the last people to live and paint at the Jillery rock shelters
02:25just 50 years ago.
02:31Oh wow.
02:35Yep.
02:40So beautiful.
02:50See this?
02:52It's a ship sort of head on.
02:54Oh, that's right.
02:55Yeah.
03:01There's a cruise liner, a battleship, and a biplane from last century.
03:10Above them, a European sailing ship from the 1800s.
03:16Underneath is a turtle painted centuries earlier.
03:27There are over 3,000 images on the walls of Jillery painted over each other layer upon
03:35layer stretching back tens of thousands of years.
03:58LIKE, PITA JOHNNY
04:03And Brazil is set as firefighters in the world full-time suspect at the beginning.
04:06So many foundersjem they worked for a day during the service.
04:12The most remarkable painting in this historical encyclopaedia is found across the valley.
04:23Ronald's ancestors painted one of Greater Australia's extinct giant animals, or megafauna,
04:30the marsupial lion.
04:34The painting rewrites our history as we entered the last ice age.
04:43Isn't that incredible?
04:45It is.
04:48Looks like nothing else.
04:52The marsupial lion was thought to have died out over 40,000 years ago.
05:02Well before the oldest dated painting in Australia.
05:08The nose is too big for our thylosine, it's a huge, powerful jaw and snout.
05:16That's going to be able to crunch, it's like a huge pig dog, but even bigger it can crunch
05:20down.
05:21Yeah.
05:22Which is why a lion, a marsupial lion.
05:28That's the best candidate, so with this animal with a marsupial lion, how big that would be?
05:35It's big.
05:36It's really big and they've got really large mouths and the teeth are enormous and they're
05:40able to actually leap and attack a large animal.
05:46They would definitely be big enough and powerful enough to attack a human.
05:51They're meant to go extinct over 40,000 years ago, but I can't see what else it can be.
05:59Either they survived much more recently than most people think from the false evidence in other
06:06parts of Australia, or this painting is much, much older than anything else in Australia,
06:14or a bit of both.
06:15But either way, this is just incredible.
06:21The painting challenges the theory that soon after arriving in Greater Australia, people
06:27hunted the megafauna to extinction.
06:33In other parts of the world, mass extinctions of megafauna were common when people first
06:39entered virgin lands.
06:42But a recent discovery by the Burritabana in Queensland suggests people lived with megafauna
06:48for 25,000 years, right up to the Ice Age.
06:56When you picked it up, we looked at each other and I said, that's rock.
06:59Yeah.
06:59That's right.
07:00We looked at each other and I said, this is a fossil.
07:02Yeah.
07:02And we were so excited.
07:04Once we started looking, that's when we started to notice other fragments and we're like,
07:10this is just not one piece.
07:11This is like a whole site.
07:21This individual specimen is a single molar.
07:24Just a single tooth from one of these giant wombats.
07:28Crocodile tooth.
07:30It's just the top of the tooth.
07:31There's one we found the other day, the tooth is about that long, 15 centimetres long.
07:37The bone right here is a femur from a giant kangaroo.
07:41It would have been about that long in life.
07:43So that's just the thigh bone.
07:46The shin bone that we know that would come to an animal of this size would be about a metre,
07:50a metre long.
07:51So if you think of a kangaroo's leg, it had these massive toes for its foot and then up
07:57into the shin to about a metre and then back up to the hip.
08:01So the actual hip of the animal would be at eye line with me right now.
08:05So that's just the hip and then the rest of it goes up.
08:14The range of species that we're getting at this particular site, it's quite phenomenal.
08:21The animals and plants and all of the creatures that we have here have been evolving in isolation
08:25for at least 65 million years.
08:30The first Australians have never seen anything like it before.
08:33Things like Diprotodont, a two and a half tonne marsupial, just like a bear with a pouch.
08:38Huge animal.
08:40Six metre long lizards, these are massive animals, they're basically a Komodo dragon but twice
08:45the size, three times the size, huge animal.
08:48We also have five metre long crocodilians, these things called palanarchus, living in the
08:53creeks and streams at the time.
08:59The reptile dominated environment would have been nothing like anywhere else on earth.
09:03They're the largest living predators since the time of the dinosaurs.
09:20First time they ever come across one of those huge crocodiles would have been one of my scariest
09:24things I reckon.
09:29We probably captured a single death accumulation, so one crocodile bringing in lots of different
09:34individuals.
09:35They throw their prey around and the limbs and the legs and the tails and things get flung
09:40off.
09:40And that's what we're actually finding.
09:54Here we have the fire bone from a giant kangaroo.
09:58And what Michelle is doing is covering it in a liquid glue of aqua deer.
10:02That solidifies the specimen in the ground.
10:06We're focusing on this particular site because the preliminary dates range in age between 25,000
10:11and 28,000 years old.
10:13If the next dating system that we use actually verifies that, then we've got the youngest
10:18megafauna site in Australia.
10:19And that's really exciting because not only will that show that megafauna survived the
10:2445,000 year extinction event, but they actually overlapped with humans for at least 25,000 years.
10:32The potential of your discovery, Beck, is that you can rewrite prehistory of Australia.
10:37We basically dispel the overkill, the blitzkrieg, hypotheses of humans coming in, hunting everything
10:43out of existence.
10:47If people were living with the megafauna for 25,000 years, it's unlikely they were responsible
10:54for wiping out these giant animals.
11:01Climate change is a much more likely candidate.
11:09Climate change is a much more likely candidate.
11:1030,000 years ago, the last ice age began.
11:17Increasingly, it became colder and drier.
11:22In tropical Queensland, even the wetlands were driven into extreme drought.
11:32It seems to have tipped the megafauna over the edge.
11:38Australia becomes so arid that all of this dries up.
11:42All of the trees would have gone, all of the browsing animals wouldn't have any feed.
11:47All you're left with is these open grasslands and even less than that, maybe just a dust
11:51bolt.
11:53Everything that was living around the environment here would have disappeared and perhaps the
11:57only places for things to survive right up on the mountain ranges.
12:01And that's where the next story would be to look into the human story about how they adapted
12:05to this massive peak and aridity and why they survived and the megafauna didn't.
12:16Unlike the megafauna, people were able to move and adapt quickly to new environments.
12:32By 20,000 years ago, the ice age was at its most extreme.
12:42Glaciers formed on the mountain ranges.
12:48Deserts expanded from 60 to 90% of the continent.
12:56At the Willandra Lakes, sand dunes crept right to the edge of the shrinking lake system.
13:04Nighttime temperatures reached as low as 25 degrees below freezing.
13:12It's difficult to imagine anyone living here.
13:18Yet on the shores of this now dry lake is one of the most incredible ice age discoveries
13:24in the world.
13:29Footprints of men, women and children made 20,000 years ago.
13:40To be able to look back and say, well, those prints were left there by my ancestors, you
13:50know.
13:50I think they were very special breed of people.
13:58I reckon a footprint is a very personal signature of an individual, isn't it?
14:05You know?
14:06It's like your handshake or your smile.
14:12The elders and scientists are checking the condition of the footprints.
14:17We've covered up the surface.
14:19It's about the size of two tennis courts and we've had to cover it up with sand and sandbags
14:26and shade cloth to conserve the surface.
14:30We didn't want it to deteriorate any further.
14:33Over 450 footprints lie under the protective layer.
14:42When the footprints were first discovered, the elders at Lake Mungo invited Pindubi trackers,
14:48Paddy Jopranankaloos and Johnny Joprila Angus to interpret them.
15:04Born in the central deserts of Australia, they are among the last people with traditional
15:10skills to understand the subtle marks in sand and clay.
15:16They were able to look at some of the marks on the track and show us things we had no
15:24idea.
15:25We actually didn't know the marks were there.
15:29What the trackers revealed was an intimate snapshot of life 20,000 years ago.
15:59A group of women and children walked towards a depression in the ground, possibly a waterhole
16:06to splash around in.
16:11Catching up with them was a young child, playfully curving around to join the group again.
16:21You've got the formed feet, but it's the feet of these people that walked around.
16:26Children, young children, some perhaps as young as three or four years old.
16:30Women, men, we are reaching back across time.
16:40Intersecting the tracks of the women and children are an astounding set of prints.
16:45One leg, one leg, one leg, tender orange.
16:52You are one of the tender orange.
16:56Open cheek.
16:59Open cheek.
17:01There is a couple of marks which do suggest that he might have been using a stick.
17:06But this is definitely a one-legged man.
17:10And this is the distance between his hops.
17:13When you explain this to someone, that we've got somebody hopping, that sort of pace, it's
17:20very hard to believe.
17:24The one-legged man chased a kangaroo with three other men running at incredible speeds.
17:56This print is significant because one, it's a big foot.
17:59It's about 29.5 centimetres.
18:03So we've got a pace of 3.7 metres.
18:07Once you've got the pace and you've got the length of the foot, you can then calculate stature.
18:14And then from there, of course, you go on to calculate speed.
18:17It's probably about 192, 194 centimetres tall.
18:21The top speed here recorded so far is 37 kilometres an hour.
18:29This is a difficult number to accept because this is around the Olympic 100 metre speeds.
18:38It's probably a burst here.
18:41It's not sustained over 100 metres.
18:43It may be.
18:45But why shouldn't these people be as athletic as we can be?
18:49You've got to face it, unless you catch your dinner, you're going to starve.
18:53And these people have to catch their dinner every day.
18:59If he's got this power and he's got this strength and he's a really good runner,
19:03I can only assume he's having good nutrition.
19:06And this is obviously somebody that's living in the height of the Ice Age.
19:19Back then, there was almost no rain, but people did have water.
19:26The dwindling lake system was kept alive with glacial melt from the snowy mountains hundreds
19:32of kilometres away.
19:49The traditional owners and archaeologists have begun an ambitious study of the entire
19:57Olandra Lake system to get a detailed picture of life right through the Ice Age.
20:04My family's always been, always stayed on country, but we looked after them in a different
20:10way to what our ancestors done.
20:12Even though I'm not fishing out in the lake or lighting a fire, even still, still there,
20:18doing work, still on country, but different things, yeah.
20:20I suppose it's called adaptation, isn't it?
20:24Moving after times, yeah.
20:30Thousands of firehards and animal bones are revealed as the sandy lunettes erode.
20:39Stone tools lie just as their maker left them.
20:51There he goes out with that.
20:54There he goes out with that.
21:07Yeah.
21:08Probably would've cut a bit of meat or skin something.
21:12Plenty of uses.
21:29No more.
21:31No more.
21:42Ignore your glasses.
21:46By 15,000 years ago, the Wollandra lakes had finally dried up.
21:52Yet people stayed on.
21:56What we have here is a baked sediment half.
21:59It's come around here. You can see where it's eroded out.
22:02And in this half, we've got some silklete stone,
22:06knap stone that's come off that nodule down there.
22:09Also, we have burnt bone.
22:11This one here's got some cut marks in it.
22:14Most likely, this got cut with one of these little stone silklete flakes here.
22:19Probably that one there. Looks like a nice sharp edge.
22:23Just to go for the big picture, you know,
22:26we're sitting on one little portion of the mungo lunette,
22:30but the whole lunette is like 33 kilometres long.
22:32And it's really only if you systematically walk out the lunette
22:39and monitor sites, as Daryl has been monitoring sites,
22:43that you get to appreciate just how much is here.
22:46Back then they had different material.
22:48They got their food a different way.
22:51Instead of people going to the supermarket,
22:53they had the supermarket out here on the ground in the lake there.
22:58It's our first organic fruit, isn't it?
23:08They got to help us out.
23:17This is a little bit of a good idea.
23:18They'll put our food a lot in the surface,
23:20It's not too bad.
23:23A huge bit of a good idea.
23:28despite living through some of the most extreme conditions people have ever known the evidence
23:35at the Willandra lakes tells a story of people thriving throughout the Ice Age
23:43it's a similar story in many arid parts of the continent how was this possible in the
23:53deserts of Western Australia the answer was to develop over truly vast distances
23:59an encyclopedic knowledge of every plant animal and water source
24:28Timmy Patterson was raised in the western desert before contact with Europeans
24:33his parents brought him to this spring at Bimbi
25:01The Maru have been bringing their families to Bimbi for tens of thousands of years
25:07and uh
25:15you
25:22you
25:28I'm a lifetime of my life.
25:30I have to go.
25:34I have to go.
25:38I have to go.
25:41I have to go.
25:42Guarului.
26:17I don't know what the wind is doing, but I don't know what the wind is doing, but I don't
26:26know what the wind is doing.
26:58Before the Ice Age when Timmy's ancestors
27:02first came to Bimpy, the surrounding lands were wetter, the animals and plants different
27:09and more abundant. As the Ice Age worsened, they saw their world drying out around them.
27:19The landscape became much, much harsher, much, much harsher. And to some extent, for the first
27:29time, groups who were adapted to semi-arid conditions were confronted with what it meant
27:35to be a desert person.
27:40In the little sandy desert, decades could pass with no rain at all.
27:46To survive, Timmy's ancestors had to know exactly where the water was and when it would
27:54be there.
28:07Do you want to know? Do you want to know? Do you want to know? Spring?
28:13I mean, that thing will give you life. Guide you straight into the water or another way.
28:20If you don't find it, well, that's it. There's a story and the meaning to that song now. Like,
28:28you know, where the soap is. That's how the people was moving. Like I'm a sample up here. I'm in
28:38this spring. There's a nearest another one is here. And I gotta go from there to there. If I can
28:46get
28:47to there, cut in, straight in. You know? That's how they were using in their head. And they told us,
28:56and we got their line. Proper song line? Yeah, proper song line, yeah.
29:20So some of these waters, like this one, are pretty well permanent. You can always go there and you always
29:27know you can get fresh water no matter what the time, even during a drought. Yeah.
29:31But other rock holes might be dried up. Yeah. So these main ones are like living waters.
29:37Living waters, yeah. Yeah. But these ones might be dried up and dangerous.
29:41Dried up and dangerous. Yeah, dangerous. Time to move out. What time do old people know?
29:45Mm-hm. And they move out to the main place. Especially on drought time. Yeah. Summertime.
29:50So if you went to the wrong one of these, during the summertime, when it's like 50 degrees,
29:57you could finish. Oh, yeah, yeah. But because people knew these main springs, like this one,
30:02that's probably why people came here and had the big meetings. Yeah, yeah. Men, women, children,
30:08because they could come together and do ceremony. Yeah. Yeah.
30:27So people survive by knowing these distributions. That's the blueprint for their survival. And
30:34they actually deploy their incredible flexibility and social organisation. They have relatives
30:41and families spread over vast distances. So they may be able to fall back on country,
30:46which is two, three hundred kilometres away. And that may be for as long as half a generation.
31:01With a good season, groups move back out to their territory and they use the fresh waters occurring
31:07in clay pans, rock holes. And it's that knowledge of the water sources and the plants and animals
31:15that could be found around them. And the fact that you could fall back to refuges like this
31:20during a particularly bad season or an extended drought or indeed something as dramatic as the last ice age.
31:30Knowledge and care of refuges was essential to life.
31:35But this alone was not enough to survive the ice age.
31:42Timmy's ancestors had to change their entire diet.
31:48We can see in Lake Mungo and from Lake Gregory and from sites that we've worked on here with traditional
31:55custodians
31:56that people responded by shifting the resources they used.
32:00They went from using fruits and macropods to relying more on things like reptiles,
32:09which are common in deserts, and a whole different kind of diet.
32:14Little bush tomatoes, salam and witchetty grubs.
32:20Even these foods were unreliable during the peak drought conditions of the ice age.
32:30People had to find a way to unlock the energy contained in the desert grasses that now dominated the landscape.
32:41Two simple lumps of fine-grained rock to release the carbohydrate from the hard seeds.
32:49The grindstone.
33:05These Maru women all grew up in the desert before contact with Europeans.
33:28You've got to use it. You've got to use it.
33:31That's right. The men used to do it too sometimes.
33:34This one, two hands.
33:35Okay, two hands? Like this?
33:46Not bad for a wadi.
33:51So keeping this up for a few hours would be good exercise.
33:57I keep it for good, because when the rain comes, you know, and the seeds will grow like wupilara,
34:09calvary, winojara, and wupilara, and like this, you know, when our grandmothers run and we
34:24run like this, you know, and we're like this, like this, like this, like this, like this.
34:43Grindstones start to become abundant when conditions become intensely dry during Australia's last
34:49ice age.
34:52The thing about grinding seeds, though, is that it's pretty labour intensive.
34:56You may have to go out and collect for many hours, and you may only get 600 or 800 kilocalories
35:02per hour in terms of processing time, but the beauty of it is that it's reliable.
35:08And we're here to kind of collect.
35:38hundreds of kilometres away and indeed they were so important they could be
35:42used to actually cement social relations if not acquire a marriage partner the
35:48travels and the journeys of these grindstones for the life of their own
35:51they were in fact reflected in mythological sagas and song lines which
35:55occur throughout the central arid lands of Australia and right through here
35:59into the central western desert
36:23it's almost certain that people shared information through some lines and
36:29stories about things like the grindstones so basically innovation language spread
36:36information exchange and of course the physical movement of people which is
36:40very mobile if not hyper mobile in Australia pumps and projects
36:45information and invention at rates I think most Europeans don't genuinely
36:52appreciate it's basically a dream time superhighway
37:08movement and communication over vast distances deep understanding of landscape
37:18methods of preparing food can all be summed up in the western desert word
37:24chukulpa the law crucial to the law was respect for the knowledge built up over
37:35thousands of years it informed the relationships and power within society and
37:43and it was the social glue that enabled our ancestors to survive the ice age even in the harshest of
37:52places
38:05mill mill mill means you know it's sacred dangerous place
38:11country sacred
38:12whatever
38:15whatever
38:16men's
38:16and that you know the redhead band
38:18men's training
38:19men's law
38:20no the law
38:21one
38:22one
38:22one
38:22one
38:22one
38:23one
38:23one
38:23one
38:26no
38:27no
38:27no
38:27no
38:27No
38:28no
38:29no
38:31this
38:32pittenja jarro elders all grew up and were initiated in the great Victoria desert of
38:38South Australia
38:40like their ancestors they are following the what anya ye song line to cross the tree
38:46list plain of the nullable
38:49it's forbidden country
38:52there's no plant food and only two tiny water holes over thousands of square comets
38:578km.
39:18Travelling through?
39:19Travelling through the buoy.
39:21I see, it's part of the initiation thing.
39:23Yes.
39:25The thingy, the men can't talk about the ritual, religious part of dreaming, but there's some
39:31structural parts to it which I think can be told.
39:35Dreaming is a much more complex, fundamentally important apparatus within society than just
39:41the turkey went here and the bush man made the mountain.
39:44It's much more about the fundamentals of their society, and in which once you know and initiated
39:51and are participating in those rituals, you also come to know the country, where you can
39:56go and where you can't go, what's safe, what will allow you to survive, what will be dangerous
40:00for you.
40:01Once you know that, this is for me the central importance of the law.
40:04You then become an important person in society.
40:10So because of the knowledge of that law, the religion of the land actually configures the
40:15social politics of the community.
40:18And it's the system in which people gain status.
40:22Society is ordered.
40:27People were using the knowledge of the law to cross the Nullarbor Plain 20,000 years ago.
40:35They made the epic journey to Kunalda Cave about once a generation.
40:41They never forgot the song line that guided them here.
40:45much to hold Fall, there won't be.
40:49There won't be Regardless of both health.
40:55A-A-Longar?
41:12Such as Boas.
41:13Now have some other songs up to start.
41:23the law also explains why they went deep inside the cave
41:46we're at canada cave and this is one of the most important archaeological sites in australia
41:51so i could be one of the most important archaeological sites in the world
41:55those old pigeon jarrah men didn't come down because they're old and it's a really steep
42:01drop-off and they're like nah they're not mad we're not going down there
42:35well the extraordinary thing about the site is is is really it's it's majesty it's a massive
42:53side there's a sort of a light cathedral glow as you enter the first part of the cave now
42:59in the past people i was led to come here with fire sticks and the first thing i've got here
43:04is um it's actually kerosene bush which is a which is a native bush which has got actually
43:10a lot of resin and oil in it so if you have two fire sticks together you actually get a
43:14flame
43:19and then we head down you can see right into the very heart of the cavern
43:54the grandeur of the landscape inside the earth it's astonishing and then you compound that sensation
44:01it's kind of surreal sensation with the with the understanding that people here 20 000 years ago
44:09one reason people were coming here was to mine kunelda's highly sacred flint
44:16the raw material is all over the walls and floor of the cave
44:24so you can imagine that's been you know part of the rock and then there's been a strike here which
44:30has taken off a small piece there there's been another strike here which has taken a very small
44:34chip there and it's snapped and fallen off there so you've got evidence of direct manufacture
44:40extraction quarrying so they fit it again on this platform here and um it's fallen off and they sort
44:47of it's literally sort of slow motion falls off as it does you get a little bulb percussion here a
44:51little
44:51lump which indicates human hands human percussion and as the force goes through the the rocket slightly
44:59ripples against the texture crystalline matrix of the rock and you get this kind of
45:04hinge fracture where the force starts to reduce and then the rock snaps off obviously it's it's so
45:10sharp it's the perfect knife
45:17this material is highly sacred now today amongst Aboriginal people that know where it is and what
45:24its stories are it's perfect for um scarification and and some of the operational procedures associated with
45:36initiation
45:38whoa
45:41this is radical
45:50deeper into the cave are hand scratchings made all over the soft limestone walls
45:58look here look at the vertical patterns here they've got to be purposeful handprints they've gone long
46:04long look at this from here right down down down
46:08i mean when i look at this you know the archaeology goes and the sort of humanity comes to the
46:17fore the
46:18proximity of the experience because they are handprints my hands are here i'm standing looking at
46:23something that's something that was done 20 000 years ago and the first instance it's just a small
46:28i guess some scratches but then as you move down and down and it's a very deep deep part of
46:32the cave
46:32it's overwhelming
46:47in the very deepest recess of the cave is a clue to why people came to make their marks
46:59well we're at the squeeze which is a passage goes from about 10 15 meters right into the heart
47:08of the earth
47:12just enough room for my chest and stomach oh i realized he went more of a comet underground so it's
47:21a
47:21reasonably pleasant claustrophobic experience
47:40i'm sitting on the very edge of a cliff which is almost a hundred foot drop below me
47:46and it falls away into a massive dome-like cavern which if i throw this rock you listen
47:54listen yep all right terrifying location now in here there are hand scratchings
48:03there are artifacts there's a great lump of flint this is where people came to
48:07into this womb-like cavern the very core of the earth
48:26a wirringoo man told me 25 years ago he's dead now
48:30that out on the nullable plain somewhere there was a hole where his people came from
48:46they came out of the ground
48:51sitting here in this vast cavern it's quite deep hole in the earth
48:59this womb-like environment in the nullable plain
49:04this passage through vaginal-like passage through into the outer chamber with this massive art
49:10this hand scratching it's almost as if people were trying to pull themselves out of the ground you can't
49:15help feeling that this was the place he was talking about
49:22were initiates for many many thousands of years 20 000 years ago brought into this cave to learn
49:28that ritual and leave their marks as part of the ongoing affirmation of that tradition
49:40rituals are very physical your eyes are shut your heads down people are there and they cram on top
49:46of you and your face is against the ground and people are screaming and it's and it's also extremely
49:52disorientating having experienced that you can imagine being here a quarter of a kilometer underground
49:57and having this visual experience lit by fire sticks adding to it if you're allowed if you're
50:04pressed against it made to touch and be dragged physical presence it's in that complication of emotion
50:10and ritual and fear and darkness and distance that that this sort of thing is i think produced
50:16it's more about the emotion of religious belief than actual art as we might understand it as a western person
50:24the markings and the ritual were designed to indelibly imprint the teachings of the law
50:39in this environment knowing the law was the only way to survive reconfigured in this way it is the last
50:48glacial maximum it is glacial it is cold it is windy it is inhospitable it is by every measure
50:56unoccupiable and yet here we are people are mining flint not just mining flint they're actually here
51:02engaging in probably complex sophisticated difficult religious practice at a time when theoretically
51:11they couldn't even live here so it tells you something about endurance of people the adaptability of
51:16people the vibrancy of the human spirit and at a time 20 000 years ago there's a lot to be
51:23learned
51:23from this cave about the occupation of australia
51:31by 18 000 years ago the ice age had reached its peak but the devastating impact of the climate had
51:41one
51:41last sting in the tail for the people of southwest as mania the improving weather was a disaster
51:54here people had lived in valleys below glaciers right through the ice age they had survived by
52:03regularly setting fire to the valley floor to create grasslands ideal for hunting wombats and wallabies
52:18in in the southwest we have a whole group of cave sites are occupied between about 40 000 years ago
52:25to about 13 000 years ago and in those deposits we find enormous quantities of one or two prey animals
52:33particularly the bennett's wallaby and the wombat and they are at enormous concentrations like in less
52:40than a cubic meter in kutakina for example there's over 250 000 bones of these animals and probably over 40
52:47000
52:47stone tools that's an extraordinary number of things left in the cave in a very small amount of soil
53:04of the land and sea council
53:06wagaramina cave was visited right through the ice age
53:12colin hughes is the heritage officer for the land and sea council
53:18his ancestors entered the darkest corners of the cave to leave stencils of their hands
53:26so yeah two fingers are found there so there's a lifting
53:36but just after these hand stencils were made 13 000 years ago
53:41this cave along with every other site in southwest tasmania was abandoned
53:54ironically as the weather became warmer and wetter the conditions for people in the southwest became
54:01unlivable
54:05so during the ice age it had been too cold and too dry for dense forest
54:11as the climate improved around 13 000 years ago the dense rainforest returned
54:20not even the fire could keep the trees back
54:25one can imagine the trees coming back from the coast choking these valleys choking out those small
54:31patches of grasses that people hunted on and finally um bringing to an end that economic strategy that
54:38people use to survive in the very coldest and harshest time i'm very proud of me because they're a very
54:45tough um up able to survive at a time for so long you know hey but eventually even they were
54:53driven
54:54out by the environmental changes that were brought by the changing climates
55:08across this vast continent people had survived the longest and most severe drought in the history of humanity
55:18only to face a new challenge
55:25over the next 10 000 years global warming caused the seas to rise more than 130 meters
55:36cutting off tasmania and new guinea from the mainland and flooding one quarter of the continent
55:45transforming ecosystems accelerating cultural change birthing new nations
56:16over the next 10 000 years global warming caused the seas to rise in the same setting
56:19also known as the port tagging mentioned before it gets into the sea so that it's to the sea
56:19world's bottom one's top one's top two's bottom one's bottom one's bottom one's top two's bottom one's bottom
56:42You