DR GRAHAM PHILLIPS:
Giant marsupials thrived in Australia for more than a million years. Then suddenly around 35,000 years ago, they disappeared. Now just why has been a matter of fierce debate. Some believe Australia's early inhabitants hunted them to extinction others disagree. Well, Paul Willis visits perhaps the only site in Australia that could answer this long-standing mystery.
PAUL WILLIS:
Dawn in the Outback. It's a primeval landscape — the land that time forgot. There's an old Buddhist saying that everything changes and that even applies to the timeless scrub of north-western New South Wales. I'm travelling to a place where the fossils speak of ancient inhabitants and new human arrivals. It's perhaps the most important fossil site in the whole country. And it's called Cuddie Springs.
DR JUDITH FIELD:
There's very few places in the whole of Australia where you get, you know, layer upon layer upon layer of different events where bones of animals have accumulated.
PAUL WILLIS:
Judith Field has been excavating Cuddie Springs for nearly 20 years, uncovering the best information we've got about what happened when the giant lumbering beasts of the past, known as megafauna, came into contact with a newly arrived predator — humans. One of the special things about Cuddie Springs is that it gives us a slice through time. Most other fossil deposits across the country are single points in the past, a little window on what happened at a particular point in time. Whereas here, we've got layer upon layer upon layer, over 900,000 years of prehistory and that allows us to ask some really complicated questions. What exactly happened to the giant wombats, killer kangaroos, monstrous geese and other weird creatures that made up the megafauna has been a continuing source of debate. One school of thought is that the arrival of the Aboriginals sealed their fate, simply hunting them into extinction in a very short period of time. The so-called Blitzkrieg hypothesis. But other researchers, including Judith, are not so sure.
DR JUDITH FIELD:
There just isn't enough evidence to be able to attribute a blame to either humans or climate change or some sort of ecological disaster that led these things to extinction.
PAUL WILLIS:
As Judith has dug down into the layers, she's travelled back in time.
DR JUDITH FIELD:
Under this plastic is the 28,000 year level.
PAUL WILLIS:
So we're sitting on 28,000 years?
DR JUDITH FIELD:
We can see there's stone tools, lots of charcoal and the bones. Under our feet represents a period about 36 to 40,000 years and we have the complete bones of a range of giant extinct animals.
PAUL WILLIS:
And at the bottom of the pit is a 400,000-year-old menagerie.
DR JUDITH FIELD:
We're looking at most of the giant extinct kangaroos. We're seeing at least two species of crocodiles. The marsupial lion. The diprotodont, you name it, just about we've found it in that level.
PAUL WILLIS:
There are breaks in this record but the important bit is a period starting around 36,000 years ago up to a layer some 27,000 years old. That's where Judith has found fossils and artefacts showing that humans and megafauna existed side by side.
DR JUDITH FIELD:
The challenge for this study has been to try and establish the links between the humans and the megafauna.
PAUL WILLIS:
Back at the University of Sydney, the thousands of fossils and artefacts are all stored in individual boxes in what's known as the Bone Room. That's where I caught up with Bundoo, one of the Indigenous volunteers who's worked alongside Judith for many years. It's a really impressive specimen, Bundoo, but how long did it take you to actually dig out?
CHRIS BONEY:
It took me three and a half weeks to dig it out. It wasn't very easy. I was upside down for three and a half weeks.
PAUL WILLIS:
And you've actually got a personal connection to the Cuddie Springs site?
CHRIS BONEY:
Yes, my own great, great grandmother used to roam the Cuddie Spring area. We want to find out that if our great ancestors and people who used to roam Cuddie Spring area, did they hunt these animal, did they survive off these animals, did they actually cook them?
PAUL WILLIS:
Tell you what, some of these guys are big buggers, how do you think you'd go up against one of them with a spear?
CHRIS BONEY:
Well, I would try and run fast as I can to get away from these animals.
PAUL WILLIS:
Still in the Bone Room, and Judith reveals some of the crown jewels of Cuddie Springs connecting humans and megafauna.
DR
JUDITH FIELD:
What we're looking at here are the bones of a Genyornis newtoni.
PAUL WILLIS:
If memory serves me right, genyornis is an overgrown goose. So this is a really big goose?
JUDITH FIELD:
Yes, it's extraordinarily big and meaty. This bone has been dated on sediments to around about 36,000 years.
PAUL WILLIS:
What else were you finding at that level?
JUDITH FIELD:
These pieces of stone that have been modified by humans. What has really been very exciting and interesting was the presence of grinding stones, these have been used for grinding grass seeds.
PAUL WILLIS:
How old are they?
JUDITH FIELD:
30,000 years old. So nearly 20,000 years older than any similar discovery anywhere else in the world.
PAUL WILLIS:
Judith and her colleagues have amassed thousands of pieces in a complex puzzle.
WOMAN:
Well, I thought it was a bone when I first picked it up…
DR
JUDITH FIELD:
What Cuddie shows us is it is likely that humans and megafauna coexisted for a long period of time. If you wiped Cuddie off the database of sites tomorrow, you'd have no evidence from anywhere on the continent that humans and megafauna coexisted.
PAUL WILLIS:
So the existence of Cuddie Springs is bad news for the supporters of the megafaunal Blitzkreig hypothesis. But a clear picture of what actually happened to these creatures is yet to emerge. And further investigations will not be conducted. Funding for Judith's research has come to an end. The fossils and artefacts are to be taken to the Australian Museum and the excavations at Cuddie Springs are to be filled in, perhaps for the last time.