Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

A site on the Wakool River, between Swan Hill and Deniliquin in the Murray River Valley of New South Wales. G. M. Black collected 126 crania on the surface from the area near Doherty's Hut at Coobool Crossing in 1950 (the Murray Black collection) and subsequently studied by Brown. The collection has since been returned to Aboriginal People for reburial.

Dating was hampered by the lack of stratigraphy, but bone from 1 skull, Coobool Creek 65, returned a date of 14,300 +/- 1,000 BP (LLO-416), by the uranium thorium method.

It has been shown that these skulls show clear links with those from Kow Swamp (Flood, 2004). It was originally concluded by Brown, after comparing them to those from Kow Swamp, that they were part of a single homogeneous population during the Pleistocene. Others, such as Thorne disagree, suggesting that as they were collected from a surface site they may have originally been buried over a long period, possibly 20,000 years, not a single population from the terminal Pleistocene.

A study by Arthur Durband reported in the Journal of Human Evolution supports the suggestion that at least some groups in Pleistocene Australia were practicing cranial deformation. Among the Coobool Creek crania studied numbers 1, 41, 65 and 66 display the strongest evidence of deformation, and a number of other crania from the study group show clear evidence of culturally manipulated changes to the cranium. Many of the skulls from Coobool Creek are very similar in shape to those form New Britain that are known to be artificially deformed (Durband, 2008).

Sources & Further reading

Josephine Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, J.B. Publishing, 2004

Links

1. Coobool Creek
2. Artificial cranial deformation in Pleistocene Australians-the Coobool Cfreek sample