15,000 Years Of Rock Art

By Cernig

This is just way cool.

Arnhem Land, jutting into the Arafura Sea at the top of Australia, has always been a special place for Aboriginal people. Just how special has been reinforced by the discovery of an extraordinary collection of rock art recording life in the area for the past 15,000 years, up until 50 years ago.

Alongside ancient paintings of thylacines, a mammal long extinct on the mainland, are images documenting modern-day inventions – a car, a bicycle wheel, a biplane and a rifle – as well as portraits of a missionary and a sea captain. Scientists documenting the rock art, spread across at least 100 sites in the remote Wellington Range, say it ranks among the world's finest.

It also appears to rewrite Australian history, undermining the widely held assumption that the continent was isolated and largely unvisited until the First Fleet arrived in 1788. The paintings suggest that, on the contrary, the people of northern Australia have been interacting with seafaring visitors from Asia and Europe for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years.

Fifteen thousand years of continuous historical recording in graphics rather than words. It's got the "recorded history" of the West beat hollow. And another bit of the narrative of world history, based around a Judeo-Christian exceptionalism and really only interested in calling the direct antecedents of that tradition "early civilization", bites the dust.

Comments

[zenpundit]

"It also appears to rewrite Australian history, undermining the widely held assumption that the continent was isolated and largely unvisited until the First Fleet arrived in 1788."

I'm not sure how accurate a description that is of the state of mainstream Australian history. I'm no aficianado of Down under history but my understanding is the aboriginals arrived in Australia circa 38,000 BC. If I'm aware of that, I would expect that it's hardly news to Australians.

[Steve Hynd]

Hi Zen,

No, it's undermining the assumption that aborigines lived there without outside contact until the First Fleet. I realise the way it's phrased in the article is misleading but I thought the following sentence clarified it.

Regards, C