Settlement of Sahul: human occupation of Australia at Madjedbebe

Date

c. 65,000 years ago

Category

Exploration & colonisation

Region

Sahul (northern Australia)

Era

Prehistory

Significance

Excavations at Madjedbebe, a rock shelter on the lands of the Mirarr people in northern Australia, place human occupation at around 65,000 years ago on the basis of optically stimulated luminescence dating of the artefact-bearing sands.

The site preserves a rich assemblage including ground-edge hatchet heads, grinding stones, and large quantities of ground ochre, indicating sophisticated technology and symbolic behaviour from the earliest layers. Reaching Australia required crossing the deep-water straits of Wallacea even at lowered Ice Age sea levels, making the peopling of Sahul (the combined Pleistocene landmass of Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania) one of the earliest documented achievements of purposeful seafaring by Homo sapiens. The date sets a minimum age for both the colonisation of the continent and the broader out-of-Africa expansion across southern Asia. Some researchers question whether artefacts may have moved downward through the sandy sediments, and other Australian sites give younger first-occupation ages closer to 50,000 years, keeping the precise timing under active debate.

Related exploration & colonisation events

• Dmanisi: the earliest well-dated humans in Eurasia
  c. 1.8 million years ago
• Pre-Clovis America: Monte Verde and the Pacific coastal route
  c. 16,000–14,500 years ago
• White Sands footprints: humans in the Americas during the Last Glacial Maximum
  c. 23,000–21,000 years ago
• Earliest human occupation of the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau
  c. 40,000 – 30,000 years ago
• Earliest humans reach Asia: stone tools at Shangchen, China
  c. 2.1 million years ago
• Early settlement of Japan and obsidian seafaring to Kozushima
  c. 38,000 years ago

Further reading

A History of the Pacific Islands

The wider story

A History of the Pacific Islands

Steven Roger Fischer

The standard accessible overview of Oceania from settlement to the modern era.

Get it on Amazon →

As an Amazon Associate, Human Saga earns from qualifying purchases.