Professor Bruno David (left) and Uncle Russell Mullett were part of a research team who excavated Cloggs Cave in Gunaikurnai Country.
Supplied: Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation.
The problem with creationism's origin myths is that the people who made them up only knew of their small area around the Canaanite Hills, so they had no idea what was happening elsewhere or any history of life on Earth of other human cultures. Indeed, because they thought the entire Universe consisted of a small, flat planet with a dome over it, they didn't even suspect there might be inhabited land in a southern hemisphere of a spheroid planet.
So, news that the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation (GLaWAC) and Monash University researchers have unearthed evidence of rituals dating back 500 generations (i.e. 12,000 years, or 2,000 years before the Bible's authors imagined the Universe was created) and that the ritual is till used today, having survived the legendary global genocidal flood that the Bible's authors imagined, along with this archaeological evidence in a cave that would have been flooded by any such global flood, had it really happened.
Who were the mulla-mullung in Australian Aboriginal culture? In some Australian Aboriginal cultures, the term "mulla-mullung" refers to medicine men and women. These individuals hold significant roles as healers, spiritual leaders, and custodians of cultural knowledge.The ritual cure for illness, used by the mulla-mullong - powerful medicine men and women - involved attaching a possession of the sick person to the end of a throwing stick smeared with animal or human fat, and setting it at an angle in the ground. A small fire was then lit under the stick.
Here are some key points about the role and significance of mulla-mullung:
Understanding the role of mulla-mullung provides insight into the rich and complex systems of knowledge and belief that characterize Australian Aboriginal cultures. Their practices highlight the deep interconnection between health, spirituality, and community in these societies.
- Healing Practices: Mulla-mullung are known for their expertise in traditional healing practices. They use a variety of methods, including herbal medicine, spiritual healing, and physical techniques to treat ailments and injuries. Their knowledge of medicinal plants and natural remedies is extensive and passed down through generations.
- Spiritual Leaders: As spiritual leaders, mulla-mullung play a crucial role in the religious and ceremonial life of their communities. They conduct rituals, ceremonies, and rites of passage, maintaining the spiritual well-being of their people.
- Cultural Custodians: These medicine men and women are also custodians of cultural knowledge, including myths, legends, and sacred practices. They are responsible for preserving and transmitting this knowledge, ensuring the continuity of their cultural heritage.
- Connection to the Dreaming: The mulla-mullung are believed to have a special connection to the Dreaming (or Dreamtime), the spiritual and mythical time of creation that underpins Aboriginal cosmology. This connection grants them the ability to communicate with ancestral spirits and access spiritual insights.
- Community Role: Within their communities, mulla-mullung are highly respected and often consulted for guidance on various issues, from health and wellness to spiritual and cultural matters. Their role is integral to the social fabric of their communities.
How this evidence was discovered in Cloggs Cave, a secluded cave in what is now eastern Victoria is related in a Monash University news release:
New archaeological find uncovers 12,000 year old First Nations ritualDetails of the excavation are in the team's open access paper in Nature Human Behaviour:
In a landmark partnership, the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation (GLaWAC) and Monash University researchers have unearthed evidence of rituals dating back 500 generations. The findings, published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour, uncover profound insights into the rich heritage of one of the world's oldest living cultures.
The archaeological excavations revealed two small fireplaces, each with a shaped single stick embedded within. The upper fireplace was the size of the palm of a human hand, with a Casuarina stem partially burned amidst the ashes. The second fireplace, buried deeper in the deposit, also contained a single Casuarina stem, this one shaped with an angled-back end like on a throwing stick.
In a remarkable find, chemical analyses revealed that both sticks had been smeared with animal or human fat, and date back to 11,000 and 12,000 years ago respectively, marking the end of the Last Ice Age.
Nineteenth century ethnography provides detailed descriptions of such fireplaces, shedding light on their purpose. Alfred Howitt, a government geologist and pioneer ethnographer, documented the ritual practices of mulla-mullung, powerful GunaiKurnai medicine men and women.
The ritual involved fastening something belonging to the sick person to the end of a throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat. The throwing stick was then stuck slanting in the ground before a fire was lit underneath it. The mulla-mullung would then chant the name of the sick person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete.
Importantly, Howitt noted that the stick was made of Casuarina and that “the practice still exists”.
GunaiKurnai Elder Uncle Russell Mullett said the findings, representing cultural knowledge passed down through 500 generations, is remarkable.
Professor Bruno David from the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre at Monash University, said the findings are a testament to the endurance of GunaiKurnai cultural practices and oral traditions.For these artefacts to survive is just amazing. They’re telling us a story. They’ve been waiting here all this time for us to learn from them. A reminder that we are a living culture still connected to our ancient past. It’s a unique opportunity to be able to read the memoirs of our Ancestors and share that with our community.
Uncle Russell Mullett.
An earlier excavation at Cloggs Cave was undertaken in the 1970s, at a time when Traditional Owners were not consulted about excavations on Country.The connection of these archaeological finds with recent GunaiKurnai practices demonstrates 12,000 years of knowledge-transfer. Nowhere else on Earth has archaeological evidence of a very specific cultural practice previously been tracked so far back in time.
Professor Bruno David.
Uncle Russell Mullett believes it’s time for GunaiKurnai to reclaim the stories and better understand the ways of their Old Ancestors.
The findings demonstrate that despite millennia of cultural innovations, GunaiKurnai also passed down cultural knowledge for countless generations, and have done so since the Last Ice Age and beyond.Today, GLaWAC and Monash University are showing what a true Traditional Owner-led partnership should look like. It’s only when you combine the Western scientific techniques with our traditional knowledge that the whole story can start to unfold.
Uncle Russell Mullett.
AbstractOf course we can confidently expect creationists to lie about the dating of these artifacts being wrong, or the scientists making them up to fit some preconceived narrative - unlike creationists who make things up to fit a preconceived narrative.
In societies without writing, ethnographically known rituals have rarely been tracked back archaeologically more than a few hundred years. At the invitation of GunaiKurnai Aboriginal Elders, we undertook archaeological excavations at Cloggs Cave in the foothills of the Australian Alps. In GunaiKurnai Country, caves were not used as residential places during the early colonial period (mid-nineteenth century CE), but as secluded retreats for the performance of rituals by Aboriginal medicine men and women known as ‘mulla-mullung’, as documented by ethnographers. Here we report the discovery of buried 11,000- and 12,000-year-old miniature fireplaces with protruding trimmed wooden artefacts made of Casuarina wood smeared with animal or human fat, matching the configuration and contents of GunaiKurnai ritual installations described in nineteenth-century ethnography. These findings represent 500 generations of cultural transmission of an ethnographically documented ritual practice that dates back to the end of the last ice age and that contains Australia’s oldest known wooden artefacts.
Main
Determining the longevity of oral traditions and ‘intangible heritage’ has important implications for understanding information exchange through social networks down the generations1. This can be achieved by tracking the origins and transmission of ethnographically known cultural practices through their associated material culture. However, understanding the issue of transmission has been fraught with difficulties. People often re-interpret and re-inscribe what they observe with new knowledge, altering the original information along the way (the hermeneutic process)2. Additionally, exposed material evidence can be seen for generations after a site’s construction, leaving it open to copying and re-interpretation under changing cultural contexts3,4,5,6,7. One way out of this dilemma is to discover archaeological materials that could not have later been seen and copied, but that rather needed to have been passed on through intentional information exchange, such as through formal or familial education and training8. In this Article, we report two examples of one such set of cultural materials from GunaiKurnai Aboriginal Country in southeastern Australia. Each consists of a wooden stick made from a Casuarina sp. tree stem. Each stick had been trimmed by cutting or scraping off smaller twigs flush with the stem. Each trimmed stick was smeared with fatty tissue. It was then placed in a low-temperature miniature fire, which burnt for a very short duration of time. The two installations were made deep in a secluded cave that was never used for everyday occupational activities. In each case, the miniature fireplace and its trimmed wooden artefact was rapidly buried by accumulating sediments at the Pleistocene–Holocene transition and remained in situ until they were archaeologically excavated in 2020 CE, preserving the installation’s structural integrity in the process. Such wooden artefacts and their fireplace installations were previously only known from local nineteenth-century ethnography, but have now been archaeologically found dating back to the end of the last ice age, as reported here.
The examples we document here are testimony to the endurance of cultural practices and oral traditions unaffected by complications of visibility and copying. According to nineteenth-century GunaiKurnai ethnography9,10, the ritual practices involving the construction of such installations took place in secluded locations. Additionally, their key wooden components normally decayed within a few years or decades, preventing them from being regularly seen by the broader population and copied over extended periods. Furthermore, the archaeological wooden objects were juxtaposed to or smeared with fatty tissue from animals or humans when they were used, matching ethnographic practice. This association of the artefacts with fat would have remained invisible to the naked eye and is thus not amenable to copying. The suite of factors contributing to the survival of both the installations and their wooden artefacts provides unparalleled insight into the resilience of GunaiKurnai narrative traditions and the passing down of knowledge. These artefacts, along with ethnographic evidence, demonstrate the transmission of ideas and practice over a timespan of 12,000 years.
The excavation methods used in this study are reported in Methods. All stages of the research comply with all relevant ethical regulations including the Australian Archaeological Association and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Codes of Ethics. This research was requested and led by, and undertaken with the participation of, the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation, representing the Aboriginal Traditional Owners of the study site. At the corporation’s request, the ethical protocols for this partnership research were formally written into a memorandum of understanding checked for ethical compliance and co-signed by the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation and Monash University on 23 October 2018.
Results
Cloggs Cave
Cloggs Cave is a 12-m-deep × 7-m-wide × 5-m-high domed cavity in outcropping limestone near the junction of the Buchan and Snowy rivers in temperate eastern Victoria, southeastern Australia (Fig. 1 and Supplementary Fig. 1)11. Environmental conditions inside the cave are dry and cool (~15 °C) year round, varying little seasonally. A 2 × 2 m archaeological excavation was undertaken near the middle of the main chamber in 1971–1972, some 2 m from the inner end of the entrance passage, revealing 2.4 m deep but sparse archaeological deposits adjacent to and overlying fine sediments with extinct megafaunal remains. The neutral to slightly alkaline fine sediments were rich in organic remains including leaves and other plant matter12. However, none of the plant material was originally analysed in detail, and none other than ash and charcoal was attributed to human activities. Our 2019–2020 excavations were undertaken against the cleaned southeast (new excavation squares P34 and P35) and northeast (new square R31) walls of the original, open excavation pit to obtain a detailed chronological sequence for the deposit, and to investigate a 12,000-year-old wood artefact whose extreme end became exposed during the cleaning of the square R31 wall (Supplementary Fig. 2)13.Cloggs Cave contains a number of archaeological features characteristic of GunaiKurnai ritual installations and practices. The following ritual features date to various times that together span some 23,000 years, indicating that the cave has been used for a range of ritual activities over this period of time: (1) a stone arrangement occurs at the back of a shallow recess towards the rear of the cave (the alcove)11. (2) Up to 80 cm above the floor of this recess, on the alcove’s low ceiling within human reach, many of the stalactites were artificially broken. Uranium–thorium ages for the bases of ‘soda straws’ (stalactitic filament regrowths) growing on the broken stalactite stumps indicate they started growing between 120 ± 30 and 23,230 ± 300 years ago, signalling that the stalactites had been broken within the period of confirmed Aboriginal presence in the cave, which began by ~25,000 cal BP (calibrated radiocarbon years before 1950 CE)11. (3) On the floor adjacent to the stone arrangement is a large patch of powdered (crushed) calcite11. (4) A portable grindstone with traces of crushed calcite crystals, dated to between 1,535 and 2,084 cal BP, was excavated 8 m away near square P35 (refs. 13,14). (5) One hundred fifty-eight broken soda straws and crystal quartz artefacts were found in the excavations in squares P34–P35 and R31 (ref. 15). Nineteenth-century GunaiKurnai ethnography, along with current GunaiKurnai knowledge holders, identify these objects as bulk (pebbles) and groggin and kiin (crystals). Each of these object types was documented to hold ritual power and to have been used to perform magic and medicine10,16. (6) A fully buried standing stone, around 2,000 years old, was excavated in square P35 (refs. 13,17). (7) Despite the presence of tens of thousands of bones from small vertebrates (from natural deaths, mainly from owl roosts), there are no vertebrate animal food remains in the excavations18. (8) Local ethnography and current GunaiKurnai knowledge document that caves such as Cloggs Cave were never used for general occupation in GunaiKurnai Country; the lack of archaeological food remains in such caves is consistent with the ethnography. Rather, the caves were the retreats of mulla-mullung, powerful medicine men and women who practiced magic and rituals in secluded places17.Fig. 1: GunaiKurnai Registered Aboriginal Party area in southeastern Australia, showing the location of Cloggs Cave.
The ritual installations reported in this article were excavated at Cloggs Cave.
Here, we report on two additional buried archaeological installations dating to the end of the last ice age that match local nineteenth-century ritual structures, recently revealed through the excavation of square R31 at Cloggs Cave.Fig. 2: The two miniature fireplaces with trimmed sticks immediately after they were exposed by excavation in Cloggs Cave square R31, with the sticks’ bases not yet separated from the sediments in which they sit.
a, The installation from XU8–9 (SU4D) dates to 10,720–12,420 cal BP (Bayesian-modelled age). b, The installation from XU11 (SU4E) dates to 11,420–12,950 cal BP (Bayesian-modelled age).
Fig. 3: Soft tissue on wood artefacts from Cloggs Cave square R31.
a, V. ursinus scat manually positioned on the installation from XU11. b, The location of lipid extraction (shown in c and d) on the trimmed stick from XU8–9. Note the palaeo-staining of the wood; the lipids came from the lighter section of the wood in the lower right quarter of the photograph (photographed at ×30 magnification under cross-polarized light). c,d, Two examples of lipid residues (clear transparent ‘bubbly’ film) on the trimmed stick from XU8–9 (photographed at ×400 magnification under part-polarized light). e,f, Lipid or keratin-like fragments on the 11,420–12,950 cal BP (Bayesian-modelled age) trimmed stick from XU11. In e, it has taken up the PSR stain and is thus stained pink, while the stain in f is more diffuse and has only been taken up along its peaks and ridges, as represented by the thin pink lines in the fragment (photographed at ×400 magnification under part-polarized light).
Fig. 4: The three largest pieces of wood from the two miniature fireplaces at Cloggs Cave, showing details of the two trimmed sticks.
a, The trimmed stick from the XU8–9 fireplace. b, End view of the XU8–9 trimmed stick, showing the large rays (blue arrows) characteristic of Casuarina spp. At this magnification, the smaller rays are not visible. The number of large rays is characteristic of C. cunninghamiana. The vessel distribution and vessel sizes are relatively uniform. c, The proximal end of the trimmed stick from the XU8–9 fireplace. The remnant base of a twig trimmed off flush with the smooth surface of the stick is evident (yellow rectangle). d, The trimmed hooked stick from the XU11 fireplace. The distal end is charred. The blue rectangle shows the proximal end from which the torn and fibrous end was broken from the tree. The red rectangles show larger twigs that were trimmed or broken off. The yellow rectangles show small twig junctions cut or scraped off flush with the stem, creating a smooth shaft on the stick. e, Torn fibrous proximal hooked end of the trimmed stick from the XU11 fireplace. The fibrous elements indicate that the wood was green when broken. The base of a small twig cut or scraped flush with the main stem is evident (yellow rectangle). f,g, Three different bases of twigs (yellow rectangles) cut or scraped flush with the main stem of the stick from the XU11 fireplace. h, Small twig from the XU11 fireplace. It exhibits no signs of twig removal nor charringPhotos by Steve Morton.David, B., Mullett, R., Wright, N. et al.
Archaeological evidence of an ethnographically documented Australian Aboriginal ritual dated to the last ice age.
Nat Hum Behav (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01912-w
Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
However, intellectually honest people faced with evidence that their preferred historical narrative was made up by ignorant people who got it all wrong, would begin to change their mind about the infallibility of the book their tales eventually found their way into, just like scientists did a few hundred years ago when they abandoned religious dogma in favour of the scientific method and an objective assessment of the real-world evidence.
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