Landscape Matching 7,000 Year Old Songline Discovered in Australia

Researchers found two ancient watering holes in the ocean that correspond to songlines the Aboriginal and Torres Strait First Nation people still know

Hiya!

As a species, we’ve spent a long time gathering and sorting information into an organized tree of knowledge, with branches dedicated to distinct categories. The math and science branches include subjects like algebra, biology, physics, etc. But the tree of knowledge also has branches for art, music, philosophy, language, and everything else we’ve discovered or created.

But now we’re entering a new phase that uses the tree of knowledge to create a garden by combining and overlapping individual subjects to construct new ones or unveil new layers. Such is the case for today’s topic, in which archeologists teamed up with Australia’s First Nation Elders to make a new connection between human history and the land.

Songlines

Today, song lyrics often tell a personal story of love, loss, or some other human emotional experience — but songs were once used for a wholly different purpose. Songlines differ from song lyrics in a couple of ways. For one, lyrics to a song remain within the confines of the song, whereas songlines will often follow one another to create an intricate oral map of a place.

First Nations people used songlines before written language was a thing as a spiritual and mnemonic method of navigating Australia’s intense terrain. Australia’s National Maritime Museum explains:

“For thousands upon thousands of years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have navigated their way across the lands and seas of Australia using paths called songlines or dreaming tracks. A songline is based around the creator beings and their formation of the lands and waters during the Dreaming (creation of earth). It explains the landmarks, rock formations, watering holes, rivers, trees, sky and seas.”

Songlines convey knowledge by shaping it into dramatic story songs that, in addition to navigation, were used and created to transmit historical and cultural information, including values, laws, and taboos.

One of the most famous songlines is The Seven Sisters, represented by the seven stars of the Pleiades constellation in Australia’s night sky. It involves pursuit, escape, magic, desire, and the power of family. The story is of a shapeshifting villain who chases the sisters across creeks, plains, and rock formations under the night sky. I encourage you to click the last link to see a retelling by a First Nation Elder named Timmy Douglas, who I’ll tell you more about later on.

Previous Research

Between 2015 and 2019, Mick O’Leary, a marine geologist at The University of Western Australia, along with several other specialists, including archaeologists, geomorphologists, geologists, rock art specialists, specialist pilots, scientific divers, and more worked together and discovered the first two submerged ancient Aboriginal archaeological sites found underwater off of the coast of Western Australia.

At the first site, called Cape Bruguieres, the team uncovered hundreds of stone artifacts - including mullers and grinding stones. The second site, a narrow channel between two islands named Flying Foam Passage, also showed traces of human activity linked to a submerged freshwater spring the team found about 45 feet (14 meters) below sea level.

Radiocarbon dating shows the sites date back to at least 7,000 years when rising sea levels submerged them. The team published their findings in July 2020 in the journal PLOS ONE.

New Research

The Cape Bruguieres site was much easier to reach than the narrow Flying Foam Passage, so members of the study of the 2020 study, including O’Leary, went back for further investigation. They published their second study in August 2023 in Quaternary Science Reviews.

Tidal currents are known to rip through the Flying Foam Passage, making it a challenging and treacherous place to dive. Because of this, the divers only had an hour a day to look for artifacts — and due to funding limitations, they only had a week to look. Even though funding was slim, it was the first grant given to search for underwater artifacts since the 1980s. O’Leary told Scientific American:

“We knew if we failed, there probably wouldn’t be any more money going into this type of research.”

So before the divers searched for artifacts during their limited time slot, the researchers spent two years scanning the seafloor with advanced technology, including sonar and LiDAR, to boost their chances of success.

Watering holes are good spots to search for signs of human activity because humans would have gathered at them and, sometimes, left artifacts behind. So when the team spotted the two depressions at the bottom of the Flying Foam Passage in their data, they were excited to explore it.

All their hard work paid off. The team uncovered even more stone tools, dating from at least 9,000 B.C.E. when submerged. As cool as this research and discoveries are, we haven’t even reached the most exciting part.

Linking it Together

After conducting their research, they had the idea to show a group of Australian First Nations Elders the new digital models of the watering holes. O’Leary told Scientific American that a man named Timmy Douglas was super interested in the model and spoke excitedly in his native tongue. Soon after, all the elders were gesturing and talking.

It turns out that Douglas, who is in his 90s, recognized the watering holes from part of a songline he’d known his whole life. (Side note: Douglas is who recites the Seven Sisters songline I mentioned earlier.) He told O’Leary he’d only ever seen half of the terrain described in the songline — but never the part with the watering holes.

Between the songline, the artifacts, and the changed terrain, the researchers believe the songline could have been created over 7,000 years ago — Before the watering holes were submerged, but instead were over 60 miles (100 kilometers) inland.

Sharing their archeological discovery with the First Nation Elders was a genius move. It shows how modern scientists and aboriginal and indigenous communities can work together to broaden everyone’s knowledge and discover deeper connections.

In the Future

O’Leary and the other researchers didn’t use the songline as a guide to finding their seafloor discoveries, but since connecting the two, he thinks such a situation could happen. He explains:

“We really see now you need to weave together the Western science and Indigenous knowledge, braid it together, so it’s not done as two separate things. When these things are overlaid together, you get a more holistic picture of Sea Country.”

Sea Country is a term the Mutujuga Elders call the underwater areas where ancient humans used to live. Jonathan Benjamin, an archeologist at Flinders University in Australia and first author of the newest study, estimates there are likely thousands more underwater First Nations sites around Australia’s coastlines.

In addition to expanding our knowledge of aboriginal history, Benjamin points out another benefit of their discoveries. These sites are forcing public officials and industry leaders to slow down plans to mine the seafloor and find ways to protect these sites instead.

Perspective Shift

Stories resonate with us because our ancestors used them to pass wisdom, warnings, navigation, and other knowledge from one generation to the next. But music elevates these stories and theoretically keeps them from warping over the years.

I mean, have you ever played the telephone game? It’s when a group of people sit in a circle, and one person starts by whispering something to the person next to them. Then they whisper what they heard to the next person, and so on. The last person to listen to the sentence or phrase has to say it aloud.

Usually, the original statement differs significantly from what the last person says. The point is that every time something is repeated, it’s changed just a little bit until it becomes something else entirely. (Sorta like our memories, actually, but that’s a different rabbit hole to dive down.)

Anyway, my teachers used the telephone game to teach students about how rumors spread, but it also demonstrates how stories can change, grow, and evolve from their original narrative.

Yet, songs are a little different because songs have a melody. It’s far easier to exaggerate a story than to change the lines of a song. Perhaps elevating information from storytime narratives to rhythmic ones helped preserve knowledge more effectively while minimizing distortion. I mean, I dunno, but it’s fun to think about.

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Photo by Michael on Unsplash