The discovery of the 7 million year old Pliocene ancestral hominid skull endocasts at Bega, New
South Wales, not only presents us with the prospect of a far greater antiquity of Man in Australia,
but also together with the 17 million year old Miocene slate fossils also previously described, hint at the
possibility that a race of tree-dwelling primates could have entered this continent [unless there had been
a separate Primate evolution in Australia?], abandoning their arboreal existence to adopt a terrestrial
lifestyle well before this event tool place in Africa.
These first ancestral hominids looked far different to later forms, such as Homo erectus, for
they would have still retained an ape-like appearance. Yet once they left the trees to forage on the
ground their lifestyle changed dramatically, as palaeoanthropological evidence gathered from African
sites alone well demonstrates. The change from a probable originally herbivorous, to an omnivorous
diet came from the bipedal stance.
Our earliest [Australian] hominids could not have evolved their hunting activities without
employing the crudest of weapons and this development finally separated our ancestral hominids from
their tree-dwelling past, setting them off on the long road that has led to ourselves.
The first weapons would have been stones, such as water-smoothed pebbles of a size heavy
enough to inflict injury or death upon prey. Naturally, flaked sharp-edged stones would have been
employed to cut up the ‘kill’, until these primitive beings gradually discovered how to obtain sharpened
flakes through smashing large stones against a hard stone surface or smashing two together.
They
would also have used sticks and broken bones for digging purposes in their search for yams etc.
These activities are said to date back at least 2,500,000 years in Africa, although the late Dr
Louis S.B. Leakey, working in Kenya in mid-1968, unearthed evidence that a “bone smashing African
ancestor of man” used a crude kind of stone hammer at least 12 million years ago.
The presence of ancestral hominids in Australia by around 7 million years ago [and earlier, as
suggested by the Mt Victoria, New South Wales, Miocene slate fossils], implies the use of crude tools,
either of naturally formed, or else deliberately manufactured sharp flakes.
We believe that such tools exist in Australia, as yet unknown, and which in any case would go
unrecognised by a scientific establishment which continues to look to Africa for our human beginnings.
This is the purpose of this chapter, for we intend to show that, not only do primitive ‘eoliths’ [ie
Dawn Tools] exist here, but that archaic tools manufactured by Homo erectus, further demonstrate a
pre-Aboriginal Stone-Age history for Australia, and that Homo erectus, the Yowie, or “hairy man” of
our Aboriginal people, continues to manufacture modern-day stone implements at his lairs, hidden
deep within the more remote regions of our eastern mountain ranges…
While ancient naturally-flaked stones possibly used by the first ancestral hominids would be
virtually impossible to identify, deliberately-flaked stones are another matter, particularly if found in
association with hominid fossil remains.
The very presence of Eolithic ‘tools’ in the Australian archaeological record, while unacceptable
today, will be more acceptable to future archaeologists unfettered by our present-day “political
correctness” stupidity which denies any evidence of a pre-Aboriginal past.
These pre-Australoid, indeed pre-Homo erectus eoliths, like eoliths found elsewhere in the
world, are often so ancient and weathered that their crudely worked surfaces are hardly recognisable
from lumps of stone.
At the time of writing of my first book, “Mysterious Australia” in 1995, I spoke of having
found eoliths near the Bathurst giant hominid ‘megatool’ sites, at sites on the Blue Mountains, on the
shorelines of long extinct Pleistocene lake systems of the New England district of New South Wales, as
well as on the Murray River of South Australia.
I have since recovered these primitive ‘tools’ at sites
over a wide area of Queensland, Central Australia and Western Australia. It seems certain that ancestral
hominids once spread across much of this continent.
Rex Gilroy
Australian Yowie Research Centre,
Katoomba, NSW
Monday 25th June 2007
