Australia’s oldest ornament found in kimberley region

Australia's oldest-known piece of Indigenous jewellery has been unearthed in the Kimberley region of northern Australia by archaeologists at The Australian National University (ANU). The ornament, a pointed kangaroo bone worn through the nose, has been dated at more than 46,000-years-old and debunks a theory that bone tools were not used in Australia for thousands of years. Researcher Dr Michelle Langley of the ANU School of Culture, History and Language said this was the earliest hard evidence that Australia's first inhabitants were using bone to make tools and ornaments. "We know people had bone tools in Africa at least 75,000 years ago. People were leaving Africa around the same time and arrived in Australia some 60,000 years ago," Dr Langley said. "Until very recently the earliest bone tools we had found in Australia dated to about 20,000 years ago, so there has been a 40,000 year gap. "Some people believed that the knowledge of bone tool making was lost on the journey between Africa and Australia.