What Archaeologists Found at Australia's Devil's Lair Has Never Been Fully Explained

In nineteen fifty-five, an American scientist sorting through kangaroo bones in a limestone cave in southwestern Western Australia found a human tooth mixed in with the animal remains. That single tooth prompted an excavation that is still producing results. Devil's Lair contains six hundred and sixty centimetres of layered sediment across more than one hundred distinct geological layers, documenting continuous human activity in the same cave across fifty thousand years. The ochre found in the earliest layers, dated to forty-eight thousand years ago, was not native to the cave. It had to be collected elsewhere and carried in, and it shows grinding striations, scraping facets, and pounding marks from deliberate processing. Three bone beads made from kangaroo limb bones, ground smooth on abrasive stone, are among the oldest personal ornaments ever found in Australia. A deliberately perforated stone pendant dates to fourteen thousand years ago. A human hip bone was found near a fire pit in circumstances that have never been fully explained. And the Tasmanian devil bones that gave the cave its name confirm that a carnivorous marsupial now found only in Tasmania once shared this landscape with the people who lived here.

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