Hundreds of years ago, in a cramped cave, Indigenous people in Australia painted a pair of watercraft whose origins have puzzled archaeologists since the artworks' discovery about 50 years ago. Now, a new study may have solved the mystery: The paintings likely depict "fighting craft" from what is now Indonesia, hinting that there may have been "physical violence" between the Indigenous people and visitors from afar.
Archaeologists identified the boats as being warships from the Moluccas (also known as the Maluku Islands), an archipelago off the eastern coast of Indonesia that's located directly north of Australia, according to a study published May 2 in the journal Historical Archaeology.
"Just these two craft suddenly add another dimension to the sphere of interaction of northern Australia — that Australia is not just some sort of land that's on its own, in the middle of nowhere and is cut off for 65,000 years from everywhere else," study co-author Daryl Wesley, an archaeologist and senior lecturer at Flinders University, told ABC News Australia. READ MORE...
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