HeavenlyPossum on Nostr: “Here we report the discovery of buried 11,000- and 12,000-year-old miniature ...

“Here we report the discovery of buried 11,000- and 12,000-year-old miniature fireplaces with protruding trimmed wooden artefacts made of Casuarina wood smeared with animal or human fat, matching the configuration and contents of GunaiKurnai ritual installations described in nineteenth-century ethnography. These findings represent 500 generations of cultural transmission of an ethnographically documented ritual practice that dates back to the end of the last ice age and that contains Australia’s oldest known wooden artefacts.”

A society that has existed in the same place, performing the same rituals, in an unbroken chain of transmission for *at least* 12,000 years is clearly doing something right.

Credit to Radical Anthropology (npub1tq2…rcp0) for the link

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01912-w