Archaeologica.org

By the 1980s, coastal archaeologists were beginning to mull over some remarkably early finds in Australia. A series of excavations by Jim Bowler, Alan Thorne, and others in the continental interior revealed that ancient humans had fished and collected freshwater mussels along the shores of the Willandra Lakes 50,000 years ago, possibly earlier. How on earth had humans managed to arrive down under so early? Even then Australia was an island continent, and some researchers reported that its indigenous inhabitants, the Aborigines, historically lacked oceangoing boats. It did not seem possible that their ancestors had arrived by watercraft.

Today these plains lie beneath almost 400 feet of water, out of reach of all but a handful of underwater archaeologists. “So this shines a spotlight on a huge area of ignorance: what people were doing when sea level was lower than at present,” says Geoff Bailey, a coastal archaeologist at the University of York in England. “And that is especially problematic, given that sea level was low for most of prehistory.”