Who were the First Australians?

0:00 Welcome to History's Not Boring by Kidopoly.com. I'm Mira. And I'm Finn. A huge hello to Mietta, who is celebrating her eighth birthday, and Remy in Australia. I hear you listen with your dad before bed, making this the perfect time to explore the ancient Aboriginal trade you've been wondering about.

0:22 And big cheers to 9.5 year old Arnie and Mum Joe in Perth, who love learning about indigenous songlines.

0:30 Plus, a very happy fifth birthday to Son, listening with his six and a half-year-old brother Ram.

0:36 If you haven't already, tap follow wherever you're listening so you never miss an episode.

0:42 Today we are travelling way, way back in time to meet the first Australians.

0:48 We're talking about Aboriginal Australians who have the oldest continuous culture on Earth.

0:54 Exactly. And to find their beginning, we have to go back a mind-blowing 65,000 years. Wait, 65,000 years? How long is that? That is about 2,600 generations of grandmas and grandpas. It's so deep in the past that Neanderthals were still walking around in Europe.

1:18 No way. That's older than the pyramids.

1:22 Way older! The pyramids were built only 4,500 years ago. This culture is more than 14 times older than the pyramids. It's even before woolly mammoths went extinct. That is epic. Let's go! So, 65,000 years ago, Earth was in the middle of a massive ice age.

1:42 Was Australia totally covered in ice and snow?

1:46 Not completely, but so much of the world's water was frozen in giant glaciers that global sea levels dropped by 80 metres.

1:54 That's taller than a 25-story skyscraper. So, did people just walk to Australia?

2:01 Nope. Even with the lower sea levels, there were still deep ocean trenches along a boundary called the Wallace Line, separating Asia and Australia.

2:10 Wait, so they had to cross the ocean?

2:13 Yes, they had to cross about 90 kilometres of deep, rough open water. 90 kilometres? On what? Did they have giant ships? No, they likely built rafts out of bamboo. That makes them the world's very first open ocean seafarers.

2:31 That takes serious bravery. Where exactly did they land?

2:36 One of the earliest known landing spots is a rock shelter in the Northern Territory called Majed Bebi. Majjed Bebi? What did they find there? In 2015, a team of archaeologists dug through two and a half metres of sand and uncovered a whopping 11,000 ancient artefacts. 11,000 items? Like what? They found ancient grinding stones for mashing seeds and the world's oldest known edge ground stone hatchets.

3:07 But wait, how do scientists know these axes are exactly 65,000 years old?

3:13 They used an incredible laser technique called optically stimulated luminescence. Optically stimulat? It's a special laser that can measure the exact time a single grain of sand was last exposed to sunlight.

3:28 That is some serious science. Okay, so they made it across the ocean. But Australia is a massive continent. How did they explore it without getting totally lost?

3:38 That's where Arnie and Joe's favourite topic comes in. They used an incredible system called Songlines. What exactly is a songline? Since they didn't have written maps on paper, they encoded their maps, laws, and history into epic songs.

3:56 Wait, so a song was literally a map?

3:59 Yes. The lyrics describe the landscape in perfect detail. They would sing about turning left at a specific red rock, or where to find a hidden freshwater spring. That is so clever! But what if you forget the lyrics while you're walking? That's the most brilliant part! The songs match the stars in the night sky.

4:19 The paths of the stars perfectly mirrored the roots on the ground.

4:24 You're kidding. So if you knew the stars, you knew the song and you knew the map.

4:29 Exactly! And these singing maps covered huge distances. One famous songline connected the central desert all the way to the eastern coast. How far is that? Over 3,500 kilometres.

4:44 3,500 kilometres? That's like walking from New York all the way to Salt Lake City.

4:51 Yep. And the songlines also acted as a cultural passport. A passport? Like a little book with stamps. No, a musical passport. When travelling through another tribe's land, you would sing the verses in their local language to show respect and let them know you were passing through peacefully.

5:11 That is the smartest navigation system in human history. Do people still use them?

5:16 Absolutely. In fact, some modern Australian highways are actually built right on top of ancient Aboriginal songlines.

5:25 Okay, so they could navigate anywhere. But what did they eat in the wild?

5:30 To manage their food supply, they used a genius technique called fire stick farming. Wait, farming with fire? That sounds super dangerous. It was actually incredibly careful. Aboriginal people lit what are called cool burns, small, low-intensity fires that moved very slowly across the ground.

5:51 But why would you set the ground on fire on purpose?

5:55 It burned away the dry, dead grass and leaves, but the fire stayed so low it didn't damage the deep roots or catch the tall tree canopy on fire.

6:05 Oh, so it actually prevented giant out-of-control summer wildfires.

6:10 Exactly! And there was a second amazing reason. When the fire passed, fresh green grass would sprout a few days later, which attracted kangaroos and wallabies.

6:22 Ah, it drew the animals right to them, making them much easier to hunt.

6:26 Yep, plus some native plants in Australia actually need smoke for their seeds to crack open and grow. And speaking of nature, Aboriginal rock art shows some amazing creatures they lived alongside tens of thousands of years ago.

6:42 Like what? Dinosaurs?

6:45 Not dinosaurs, but giant megafauna. Imagine a creature called a diprotodon. What's a diprotodon? It was a giant prehistoric wombat that weighed 2,800 kilograms. A 2,800 kilogram wombat? That's the size of a family car! Yes, and some of this rock art, found in places like the Kimberley region, is tens of thousands of years old.

7:12 The artists blew red ochre paint out of their mouths over their hands to leave stencils on the stone. That's like the world's oldest signature.

7:20 So for all those tens of thousands of years, did they live completely alone on this massive island?

7:26 Actually, no. And this brings us to Mietta and Remy's question about ancient trade. Long before European explorers arrived, Aboriginal people on the northern coast were trading with international visitors. Really? Who were they? They were seafarers called the Makassans, and they came from the island of Sulawesi in modern day Indonesia.

7:51 When did they start coming over? Starting around the 1700s, or maybe even centuries earlier, hundreds of fishermen would sail over in fleets of wooden boats called Padahu. How did wooden boats cross the open ocean? They were master sailors. They rowed the strong monsoon winds in December to reach Australia, and then used the changing trade winds in April to sail back home.

8:17 What were they travelling all that way to trade for?

8:20 Sea cucumbers, which are also known as trapang. Ew, sea cucumbers. Like those squishy blobby things that look like giant slugs on the ocean floor.

8:31 Yes. The local Yonggu people helped the Macassans harvest up to 900 tons of them every single year.

8:40 900 tonnes? What did they do with 900 tons of sea slugs?

8:46 They boiled them in giant iron cauldrons right there on the beach, then buried them in hot sand to dry. After that, they were sold all the way in China, where they were a super popular and expensive food.

9:00 That is a massive global trade network.

9:03 What did the Yongnu people get in return? The Macassans traded metal blades and axes, which made carving big wooden dugout canoes much easier. Plus, they traded cloth and tobacco.

9:17 I had no idea Australia was connected to the rest of the world like that.

9:21 Alright, Finn, time for the quiz. Are you ready? Okay, I'm ready. First question. How many years ago did people first arrive in Australia? Next one. How many ancient artifacts were found at the Majed Bebe Rock Shelter? Question three. What is the name of the paths made of songs that mapped the land? Here's number four.

9:55 What was the name of the giant extinct wombat that weighed 2,800 kilograms? Last question. What squishy sea creature did the Macassans trade for? Great job! Let's see how you did. The first answer is, people arrived 65,000 years ago. For question two, archaeologists found 11,000 artifacts. The answer to number three is they are called song lines.

10:32 For question four, the giant wombat was the die protodon. And the final answer is they traded for sea cucumbers or trapang.

10:42 I still can't get over how long 65,000 years is. That's so much incredible history.

10:49 I know! And the fact that they used the stars and songs as a massive map across the whole continent is just brilliant!

10:57 If you loved learning about the first Australians today, please leave us a five-star review.

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