What Scientists Found at Australia's Kudjal Yolgah Cave Shouldn't Exist

What Scientists Found at Australia's Kudjal Yolgah Cave Shouldn't Exist

Five kilometres from a small WA settlement, a narrow limestone cave sits largely unnoticed beneath the forest. Descend into it and you're walking down through 80,000 years of continuous history, layer stacked on layer, each one recording exactly which animals were alive on this coastline and exactly when they stopped being alive at all.

We're pretty much tracing the discovery of Kudjal Yolgah Cave, the 2016 study that used single-grain dating to precisely chart southwestern Australia's megafauna extinction, the 16 species found in one undisturbed layer spanning 80,000 to 41,000 years ago, and what it reveals about the exact window humans and this continent's Ice Age giants finally crossed paths. Researchers are still reading what those layers have to say.

#australia #fossils #paleontology