“It puts to bed the whole idea that humans wiped them out,” said Dr. Clarkson. They first performed radiocarbon dating on sediment starting at the surface until they got to layers that were about 37,000 years old. Think of a grain of sand as an empty battery that slowly collects charge once it’s buried. Back at the lab she painstakingly measured more than 28,500 individual grains of sand and used a laser to determine their ages. Jean-Luc Schwenninger, head of the Luminescence Dating Laboratory at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study, said in an email that the team’s use of luminescence dating techniques provides a convincing case that humans came to Australia 65,000 years ago.

Source: New York Times July 19, 2017 17:26 UTC