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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Two slightly burnt, fat-covered sticks discovered inside an Australian cave are evidence of a healing ritual that was passed down unchanged by more than 500 generations of Indigenous people over the last 12,000 years, according to new research.
The wooden sticks, found poking out of tiny fireplaces, showed that the ritual documented in the 1880s had been shared via oral traditions since the end of the last ice age, a study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour said on Monday.
The discovery was made inside Cloggs Cave in the foothills of the Victorian Alps in Australia's southeast, in a region long inhabited by the Gunaikurnai people.
[...] Carefully digging through the soil, the team found a small stick poking out—then they found another one. Both well-preserved sticks were made from the wood of casuarina trees.
Each one was found in a separate fireplace around the size of the palm of a hand—far too small to have been used for heat or cooking meat.
The slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat.
One stick was 11,000 years old and the other 12,000 years old, radiocarbon dating found.
"They've been waiting here all this time for us to learn from them," said Gunaikurnai elder Russell Mullett, a co-author of the study and head of GLaWAC.
Mullett spent years trying to find out what they could have been used for, before discovering the accounts of Alfred Howitt, a 19th-century Australian anthropologist who studied Aboriginal culture.
Some of Howitt's notes had never been published, and Mullett said he spent a long time convincing a local museum to share them.
In the notes, Howitt describes in the late 1880s the rituals of Gunaikurnai medicine men and women called "mulla-mullung".
One ritual involved tying something that belonged to a sick person to the end of a throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat. The stick was thrust into the ground before a small fire was lit underneath.
"The mulla-mullung would then chant the name of the sick person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete," a Monash University statement said.
The sticks used in the ritual were made of casuarina wood, Howitt noted.
Jean-Jacques Delannoy, a French geomorphologist and study co-author, told AFP that "there is no other known gesture whose symbolism has been preserved for such a long time".
"Australia kept the memory of its first peoples alive thanks to a powerful oral tradition that enabled it to be passed on," Delannoy said.
"However in our societies, memory has changed since we switched to the written word, and we have lost this sense."
More information: Bruno David et al, Archaeological evidence of an ethnographically documented Australian Aboriginal ritual dated to the last ice age, Nature Human Behaviour (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01912-w
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday July 09 2024, @05:02PM (2 children)
12,000 years without ecosystem collapse is pretty good going. Humans are (usually) notoriously destructive.
Living within our (the planet's) means is something that western 'civilization' hasn;t quite mastered yet. When I last looked, the USA was using resources per inhabitant at about 5 times the availability rate, which in turn is likely considerably higher than the sustainable rate.
Scientific American (Sepetember 2012): Use It and Lose It: The Outsize Effect of U.S. Consumption on the Environment [scientificamerican.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Mykl on Tuesday July 09 2024, @11:33PM
Human practices in Australia did cause an ecosystem collapse - it's just not discussed much.
50,000 years ago much of Eastern Australia was covered in Temperate Rainforest - quite different to the drier climate that is dominated by Gum trees. What caused the change? Early humans living in Australia discovered that they could very effectively 'hunt' animals by setting fire to the forest around them and either capturing the animals that ran out or later picking up the ones that burned to death. Low effort, easy returns. It was so effective that they kept using it.
Gum trees actually rely upon the fire cycle to germinate and spread, so this was great news for them. Over generations, the rainforests were gradually taken over by the gum trees (which benefited from fire hunting practices) and other plants that recover faster from fire, and Australia became a drier continent. The remaining humans then needed to adapt to the new environment that had been created.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday July 10 2024, @03:45AM
Primitive societies are just as good or even better at destroying the environment than technically advanced ones, there's just not enough people, and they don't have access to any kind of tools or mechanisation, for them to have much impact. For example the Australian aborigines managed to exterminate the Australian megafauna not long after they arrived despite only having about 0.01 person per square km to do it with. The Maori in NZ exterminated a bunch of species like the moa with similar restrictions, through a combination of wholesale killing and habitat destruction.
And if you want to read about the horror that was warfare in primitive societies, read "War before Civilisation": mass murder, torture of captives, killing of children, not recognising surrender, all of this was par for the course. Standard expected casualty rates for inter-tribal skirmishes started at the same level as Gettysburg and the Somme and went up from there. Again, the only reason why it wasn't worse was because the numbers were so small, at one point the book mentions that to match the casualty rates from tribal conflict in PNG the US would have had to have killed the entire population of South Vietnam.