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This paper provides new insights into the long-term history of Aboriginal use of mountainous Victoria over the past 25,000 years. It presents results of excavations at Garden Range 2 rock art site located on the edge of the Strathbogie Ranges in central Victoria. The excavations were a research collaboration between the Taungurung Land and Waters Council (TLaWC) and Monash University. Results indicate possible ephemeral visitation by the Old People during the Last Glacial Maximum, clear evidence of occupation over the past 11,000 years, and increased activity since 1600 cal BP. The stone artefact assemblage is dominated by flakes of local quartz. Three igneous flakes from ground-edge axes, dating to after 700 cal BP, are contemporary with a grinding stone showing use-wear and residues from stone axe maintenance. The faunal assemblage is dominated by forest and grassland animals, such as macropod and emu, with mussel shells and fish bones indicating the use of nearby Seven Creeks. The rarity of ochre within sediments precludes insights into the age of rock art paintings on the shelter's surface. Fossil pollen documents the nineteenth-century European forest clearances, a period when Taungurung people's use of the site became unsafe. Unburnt fragments of rabbit and sheep bone suggest subsequent use of the site as a fox den. Garden Range 2 illustrates Aboriginal use of mountainous central Victoria during periods of significant environmental changes in the Early Holocene and possibly in the Late Pleistocene. These chronological patterns, including increased activity in the central Victorian uplands during the Late Holocene, match emerging chronological patterns of long-term use of other mountainous regions of southeastern Australia. How sites like Garden Range 2 relate to broader long-term Aboriginal use of more elevated sub-alpine and alpine (snow country) zones of central and eastern Victoria is a question for future archaeological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evidence reported in Holen et al. (2017) for hominin activity at the Cerutti Mastodon site is being intensively critiqued by many of our colleagues, but often with little regard [...]

Aboriginal people in Australia have used stone tools since first arrival about 65,000 years ago. After permanent European colonisation over 200 years ago people continued to use stone, but also incorporated new, introduced tool materials in novel ways. To understand how these introduced materials supplemented or replaced stone, we need new functional analyses and reference databases that compare experimental use-wear patterns on introduced materials with archaeological use-wear patterns. In the Riverland region of South Australia, silcrete and chert are common tool stones recovered from archaeological sites, but there is also evidence of introduced materials including glazed porcelain and bottle glass. Here, we report experimental use-wear patterns on silcrete, bottle glass and glazed porcelain plate tools. Tasks included processing wood, bone, skin or hide, meat and cattail reeds with a variety of tool motions. Results show that striations are more common on glass and glazed porcelain than on silcrete. The glazed porcelain, glass and silcrete experimental tools register distinctive use-wear patterns for some but not all tasks, and supplement previous functional studies of these materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The time of arrival of people in Australia is an unresolved question. It is relevant to debates about when modern humans first dispersed out of Africa and when their descendants incorporated genetic material from Neanderthals, Denisovans and possibly other hominins. Humans have also been implicated in the extinction of Australias megafauna. Here we report the results of new excavations conducted at Madjedbebe, a rock shelter in northern Australia. Artefacts in primary depositional context are concentrated in three dense bands, with the stratigraphic integrity of the deposit demonstrated by artefact refits and by optical dating and other analyses of the sediments. Human occupation began around 65,000 years ago, with a distinctive stone tool assemblage including grinding stones, ground ochres, reflective additives and ground-edge hatchet heads. This evidence sets a new minimum age for the arrival of humans in Australia, the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa, and the subsequent interactions of modern humans with Neanderthals and Denisovans., Author(s): Chris Clarkson (corresponding author) [1]; Zenobia Jacobs (corresponding author) [2, 3]; Ben Marwick [3, 4]; Richard Fullagar [3]; Lynley Wallis [5]; Mike Smith [6]; Richard G. Roberts [2, 3]; [...]