Jinmium rock shelter
A sandstone rock shelter in northern Australia that in 1996 was claimed to hold the oldest human traces and rock art on the continent, 116,000 to 176,000 years old; re-dating in 1998 showed the deposit is younger than 10,000 years. A textbook case of how a dating method can mislead.
Dated events and their evidence
- about 144,000 years ago disputed
claimed by thermoluminescence (Fullagar, Price and Head, 1996): artefact-bearing sands 116,000 to 176,000 years old and pecked circular engravings 50,000 to 75,000 years old; rejected by the 1998 re-dating source - 8,000 BCE mainstream
single-grain optical dating and radiocarbon show the occupation deposit is younger than 10,000 years, its upper two-thirds late Holocene (Roberts and colleagues, 1998) source
Where
15.8164° S, 129.1397° E
Approximate: the shelter lies in the Keep River area of the Northern Territory, near the Western Australian border. Its exact position is not given in the sources used here, so the pin marks Keep River National Park (Wikipedia coordinates), not the shelter itself.
Sources
- https://doi.org/10.1038/30718
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s0003598x00084040
- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/05/980527184936.htm
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_River_National_Park
Each event carries Aion's own evidence grade (mainstream, disputed or speculative). This page repeats what the globe shows for this place.