Aboriginal Ritual Passed Down Over 12,000 Years, Cave Find Shows

The discovery was made inside Cloggs Cave in the foothills of the Victorian Alps in Australia's southeast, in a region long inhabited by the Gunaikurnai people. (AFP Photo)
The discovery was made inside Cloggs Cave in the foothills of the Victorian Alps in Australia's southeast, in a region long inhabited by the Gunaikurnai people. (AFP Photo)
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Aboriginal Ritual Passed Down Over 12,000 Years, Cave Find Shows

The discovery was made inside Cloggs Cave in the foothills of the Victorian Alps in Australia's southeast, in a region long inhabited by the Gunaikurnai people. (AFP Photo)
The discovery was made inside Cloggs Cave in the foothills of the Victorian Alps in Australia's southeast, in a region long inhabited by the Gunaikurnai people. (AFP Photo)

Two slightly burnt, fat-covered sticks discovered inside an Australian cave are evidence of a healing ritual that was passed down unchanged by more than 500 generations of Indigenous people over the last 12,000 years, according to new research.

The wooden sticks, found poking out of tiny fireplaces, showed that the ritual documented in the 1880s had been shared via oral traditions since the end of the last ice age, a study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour said on Monday, AFP reported.

The discovery was made inside Cloggs Cave in the foothills of the Victorian Alps in Australia's southeast, in a region long inhabited by the Gunaikurnai people.

When the cave was first excavated in the 1970s, archaeologists discovered the remains of a long extinct giant kangaroo that had previously lived there.

But the Gunaikurnai people were not involved in those digs, "nor were they asked for permission to do research there", lead study author Bruno David of Monash University told AFP.

Further excavations starting from 2020 included members of the local Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation (GLaWAC).

Carefully digging through the soil, the team found a small stick poking out -- then they found another one. Both well-preserved sticks were made from the wood of casuarina trees.

Each one was found in a separate fireplace around the size of the palm of a hand -- far too small to have been used for heat or cooking meat.

The slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat.

One stick was 11,000 years old and the other 12,000 years old, radiocarbon dating found.

"They've been waiting here all this time for us to learn from them," said Gunaikurnai elder Russell Mullett, a co-author of the study and head of GLaWAC.

Mullett spent years trying to find out what they could have been used for, before discovering the accounts of Alfred Howitt, a 19th-century Australian anthropologist who studied Aboriginal culture.

Some of Howitt's notes had never been published, and Mullett said he spent a long time convincing a local museum to share them.

In the notes, Howitt describes in the late 1880s the rituals of Gunaikurnai medicine men and women called "mulla-mullung".

One ritual involved tying something that belonged to a sick person to the end of a throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat. The stick was thrust into the ground before a small fire was lit underneath.

"The mulla-mullung would then chant the name of the sick person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete," a Monash University statement said.

The sticks used in the ritual were made of casuarina wood, Howitt noted.

Jean-Jacques Delannoy, a French geomorphologist and study co-author, told AFP that "there is no other known gesture whose symbolism has been preserved for such a long time".

"Australia kept the memory of its first peoples alive thanks to a powerful oral tradition that enabled it to be passed on," Delannoy said.

"However in our societies, memory has changed since we switched to the written word, and we have lost this sense."

He lamented that the ancient animal paintings found in French caves would probably "never reveal their meaning" in a similar way.

Indigenous Australians are one of the oldest continuous living cultures, and Mullett said the discovery was a "unique opportunity to be able to read the memoirs of our ancestors".

It was "a reminder that we are a living culture still connected to our ancient past," he added.

juc-dl/bc

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Japan Births in 2024 Fell Below 700,000 for First Time 

People walk along a pedestrian crossing at a shopping street Wednesday, June 4, 2025, in Tokyo. (AP)
People walk along a pedestrian crossing at a shopping street Wednesday, June 4, 2025, in Tokyo. (AP)
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Japan Births in 2024 Fell Below 700,000 for First Time 

People walk along a pedestrian crossing at a shopping street Wednesday, June 4, 2025, in Tokyo. (AP)
People walk along a pedestrian crossing at a shopping street Wednesday, June 4, 2025, in Tokyo. (AP)

The number of births in Japan last year fell below 700,000 for the first time on record, government data showed Wednesday.

The fast-ageing nation welcomed 686,061 newborns in 2024 -- 41,227 fewer than in 2023, the data showed. It was the lowest figure since records began in 1899.

Japan has the world's second-oldest population after tiny Monaco, according to the World Bank.

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba has called the situation a "quiet emergency", pledging family-friendly measures like more flexible working hours to try and reverse the trend.

Wednesday's health ministry data showed that Japan's total fertility rate -- the average number of children a woman is expected to have -- also fell to a record low of 1.15.

The ministry said Japan saw 1.6 million deaths in 2024, up 1.9 percent from a year earlier.

Ishiba has called for the revitalization of rural regions, where shrinking elderly villages are becoming increasingly isolated.

In more than 20,000 communities in Japan, the majority of residents are aged 65 and above, according to the internal affairs ministry.

The country of 123 million people is also facing increasingly severe worker shortages as its population ages, not helped by relatively strict immigration rules.

In neighboring South Korea, the fertility rate in 2024 was even lower than Japan's, at 0.75 -- remaining one of the world's lowest but marking a small rise from the previous year on the back of a rise in marriages.