Story Archive

When You Gotta Go

Giles Hamm, a consultant archaeologist and doctoral student at La Trobe University in Vic., Australia, was surveying gorges with Clifford Coulthard in the northern Flinders Ranges in South Australia. “Nature called and Cliff walked up this creek bed into this gorge and found this amazing spring surrounded by rock art,” Hamm said. The site Coulthard found turned out to be occupied approximately 10,000 years earlier than the earliest known settlement of the area. The previous oldest-known site in this zone was around 38,000 years old, but this site was dated to around 49,000 years ago. The discovery “puts people moving south from the northern part of the continent to the southern interior a lot sooner than we thought,” Hamm said. There’s even evidence at the site of humans coexisting with megafauna. “A man getting out of the car to go to the toilet,” Hamm said, “led to the discovery of one of the most important sites in Australian pre-history.” (MS/ABC Australia) ...Though critics are calling it a piss-poor way to discover something.