Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

There doesn't seem to have been many instances of major stone mining in Australia during the late Pleistocene. The raw material for their stone culture at the time seems to have cone mainly from local sources, most of the artefacts being made from naturally-fractured river pebbles picked up from the ground (Hiscock, 1996, Hiscock & Allen, 2000). Only about 1/3 of known stone quarries in Australia contain evidence of mining during the Pleistocene, most being from the Holocene, where they have been dated. Mostly they appear to show material was obtained for exchange, the oldest known dated site in Australia being Koonalda Cave.

Flint mining was found in Koonalda Cave on the Nullarbor Plain where the mining has been found to have occurred between 24,000 and 14,000 years ago.

Mining and quarrying

Sources & Further reading

1. Josephine Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, J. B. Publishing
2. Phillip J. Habgood & Natilie R. Franklin, The revolution that didn't arrive: A review of Pleistocene Sahul, Journal of Human Evolution, 55, 2008