Two sticks found in a cave in southeastern Australia show signs of processing that perfectly match curse-making practices described in the 19th century. The sticks have been dated at an estimated 11,000 and 12,000 years old, which would make this the longest period over which we have evidence for the continuation of a cultural practice anywhere in the world.
Cloggs Cave, in Victoria’s Gippsland region, lies within the lands of the GunaiKurnai people. In the 1970s, an archaeological dig was conducted there without consultation with the GunaiKurnai, but little of value came of it. In 2009, GunaiKurnai representatives decided they wanted their history explored properly and set about establishing a relationship with anthropologists at Monash University, which has proved vastly more fruitful.
Much of the cave became a sinkhole around 6,000 years ago, leading to objects of very different ages lying side-by-side. Consequently, Professor Bruno David and colleagues decided to focus on a part of the cave unaffected by the collapse. They found a lightly burnt Casuarina stick 40 centimeters (16 inches) long emerging from a fireplace the size of a hand, surrounded by limestone rocks. The stick was carbon-dated as approximately 12,000 years old, making it the oldest surviving wooden artifact found in Australia.
It’s very unusual for anything wooden to survive that long, and the stick showed some even more exceptional features. The singeing at one end indicated it had been briefly placed in a cool fire, nothing like what is seen for something that was once part of a fire for warmth or food.
.png "The stick as it was found in the cave, one end still in the fireplace in which it was lightly charred. The contrast with a larger fireplace for other uses is visible.")
The stick as it was found in the cave, one end still in the fireplace in which it was lightly charred.
Image Credit: Monash University
That alone indicated a ritual or cultural practice to David, and the more the stick was investigated the stronger the indication became. The stick carried lipids from human or animal fat, and twigs branching off had been carefully removed.
Further digging revealed a similar Casuarina stick, approximately a thousand years younger, but processed in the same way. The end of the second stick had an angled back like a spear thrower, an instrument associated with power among Australian Indigenous cultures.
“We are still astounded that they’ve preserved for so long,” David told IFLScience. “Things that favoured survival are: (1) this part of the cave is very dry; and (2) the sediments are not acidic, but rather have pHs between 7 and 8 … meaning that they’re neutral to slightly alkaline. Also, (3) there’s not much mechanical weathering of the deposit; no large animals running or hopping around, and the cave was never used by family groups for camping. And (4) the sticks were quickly buried by fine sediments (including by ash from later low-heat fires nearby). All of these are ideal conditions for the preservation of buried items.”
The locations in which the two sticks were found, drawn as cartoons (left) relative to rocks and a wombat dropping and photographed.
Image Credit: Monash University
Surviving GunaiKurnai people had lost the cultural memory of what the sticks might have been used for. However, 19th century ethnographer Alfred Howitt recorded aspects of culture of the Indigenous People of southeastern Australia, including descriptions of practices that were forgotten when the region’s First Nations were subsequently confined to missions and banned from speaking their own languages.
Uncle Russell Mullett of the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation (GLaWAC) discovered that, in addition to a book Howitt had published, his notes were kept in a museum. After a long struggle, Mullett gained access to these notes, restoring information not only to the GunaiKurnai but to other Indigenous Peoples whose ancestors Howitt had engaged with. At a time when many other anthropologists were mostly interested in trying to prove Indigenous Australians were racially inferior and destined to die out, Howitt appears to have been genuinely interested in their culture and a faithful reporter.
Howitt recorded that when the GunaiKurnai people wanted to curse someone, they would have a highly-trained person known as a mulla-mullung conduct a ceremony using a Casuarina stick and something belonging to whoever had attracted their ire. According to Howitt, the item from the intended victim stick was fastened to the stick with some eaglehawk feathers and the stick was smeared in human or animal fat. The stick would be stuck in the ground next to a fire and the mulla-mullung would sing over it, including the victim’s name. If buried soon after the ritual, the stick would have been indistinguishable from the two sticks David and colleagues found.
Mulla-mullung were also healers and may have had matching rituals designed to cure people.
Jessica Shapiro of GLaWAC told IFLScience that reports of the ritual are distinctive to GunaiKurnai country.
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.
Uncle Russell Mullett
“The connection of these archaeological finds with recent GunaiKurnai practices demonstrates 12,000 years of knowledge-transfer,” David said in a statement. “Nowhere else on Earth has archaeological evidence of a very specific cultural practice previously been tracked so far back in time.”
The GunaiKurnai lands border on Bass Strait, which flooded around the times these sticks were used, isolating Tasmania. Intriguingly, there is evidence Tasmanian Indigenous people retained stories of that flooding, as well as positions of the stars at the time, until the 19th century, becoming then the oldest surviving stories in the world.
“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,” Mullett said.
“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,”
The discovery is published open access in Nature Human Behaviour.
