An ancient giant kangaroo bone from Australia's Mammoth Cave has long been cited as evidence that Indigenous Australians hunted megafauna to extinction. But a new study, powered by advanced technology, has turned that assumption on its head. Researchers used microCT scanning and radiometric dating to reexamine the bone, originally thought to show butchery marks from 65,000 years ago. Their findings, published in Royal Society Open Science, reveal that the cuts were made after the bone had already fossilized—not on fresh bone from a recent kill, the Smithsonian reports.
This suggests that early Australians were not necessarily the hunters who drove giant marsupials to extinction, but perhaps fossil collectors. The analysis uncovered shrinkage cracks in the bone that appeared before the cut was made with human tools. "Back in 1980, we interpreted the cut as evidence of butchery because that was the best conclusion we could draw with the tools available at the time," Michael Archer, lead author of the new study and co-author of the original analysis, said in a news release. "Thanks to advances in technology, we can now see that our original interpretation was wrong."
The study "is going to ruffle the feathers of those people who are convinced that First Nations people were the primary reason why megafauna species went extinct," Archer tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "What we're saying is the flip side of that argument, is that it's more probable it was climate change."
- The research also highlights the possibility that Indigenous Australians had a cultural or symbolic appreciation for fossils long before Europeans did, possibly even trading them over long distances. A charm with the fossilized tooth of an extinct marsupial was found nearly 2,000 miles from Mammoth Cave, but researchers believed it originated in the area. "You could say that First Peoples may have been the continent's—and possibly the world's—first paleontologists," said study co-author Kenny Travouillon.
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Many large mammals died out in Australia around 40,000 years ago. The first people are believed to have arrived in Australia around 25,000 years earlier, meaning they coexisted with the animals for thousands of years. The study's authors say it's possible that early Australians hunted megafauna, as ancient peoples did elsewhere in the world, but there's no hard evidence. "If humans really were responsible for unsustainably hunting Australia's megafauna, we'd expect to find a lot more evidence of hunting or butchering in the fossil record," Archer says. "Instead, all we ever had as hard evidence was this one bone—and now we have strong evidence that the cut wasn't made while the animal was alive."
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