Intrepid Science Blog

Exciting results published today in the international science journal Nature provide precious new insights into the arrival and movement of humans across Australia over a staggering 50,000 years.  Sadly, many Aboriginal Australians no longer live where their ancestors had called home. So to better understand Australia’s history before the arrival of Europeans, a forward-thinking initiative called the Aboriginal Heritage Project was set up. Led by the University of Adelaide ’s Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD ) in partnership with the South Australian Museum and Aboriginal families and communities, the team – in which I was fortunate to play a small part – have uncovered some remarkable new findings.  Headed by Alan Cooper and Ray Tobler, the ACAD group analysed over 100 hair samples collected with consent from Aboriginal people across the continent between the 1920s and 1970s.  These samples were collected as part of a project where along with hair, det...

500 years of drought and flood: trees and corals reveal Australia's climate history Patrick Baker , University of Melbourne ; Chris Turney , UNSW Australia , and Jonathan Palmer , UNSW Australia Australia is the land of drought and flooding rains, and in a recent paper we’ve shown that’s been the case for more than 500 years. As part of our Australia and New Zealand Drought Atlas we’ve published the most detailed record of drought and wet periods (or “pluvials”) since 1500. The data reveal that despite the severity of the Millennium Drought, the five worst single years of drought happened before 1900. But 2011 was the wettest year in our 513-year record. The dominant theme of Australia’s drought history is variability. We may get one year of extremely wet conditions (for example in 2011) or we might get six years of extremely dry conditions (such as 2003-2009). North Queensland may be flooded out while Victoria suffers with drought. Or in extreme circumstances, the entir...

There was a time – yesterday, geologically speaking – when kangaroos 3 metres tall hopped about Australia, elephants roamed North America and 2-metre high birds strutted around in New Zealand. Since the end of the nineteenth century, many different writers have noticed that the world doesn’t have an abundant number of creatures over 40 kilograms. Collectively, these large beasts are known as ‘megafauna’. Alfred Wallace, who wrote the first paper on evolution by natural selection with Charles Darwin, noted that ‘we live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared’. We now know that the extinction of many of these creatures was global and that they died out quite recently. Their bones, when explorers and researchers found them, were not fossilized, suggesting their death was a matter of thousands of years ago. But the extinction seems to have happened at different times in different places. Some regions ev...