bbc | Scientists are beginning to tap into
a wellspring of knowledge buried in the ancient stories of Australia's
Aboriginal peoples. But the loss of indigenous languages could mean it
is too late to learn from them.
The Luritja people, native to
the remote deserts of central Australia, once told stories about a fire
devil coming down from the Sun, crashing into Earth and killing
everything in the vicinity.
The local people feared if they strayed too close to this land they might reignite some otherworldly creature.
The
legend describes the landing of a meteor in Australia's Central Desert
about 4,700 years ago, says University of New South Wales (UNSW)
astrophysicist Duane Hamacher.
It would have been a dramatic and
fiery event, with the meteor blazing across the sky. As it broke apart,
large fragments of metal-rich rock would have crashed to Earth with
explosive force, creating a dozen giant craters.
The
Northern Territory site, which was discovered in the 1930s by white
prospectors with the help of Luritja guides, is today known as the
Henbury Meteorites Conservation Reserve.
Mr Hamacher, who runs an Indigenous astronomy program at UNSW, says
evidence is mounting that Aboriginal stories hold clues about events
from Australia's ancient past.
Last year, he travelled to Victoria with tsunami expert James Goff, also from UNSW, to visit members of the Gunditjmara people
"They
describe this gigantic wave coming very far inland and killing
everybody except those who were up on the mountaintops, and they
actually name all the different locations where people survived," says
Mr Hamacher.
He and Mr Goff took core samples from locations
between 500m and 1km (0.6 miles) inland, and at each spot, they found a
layer of ocean sediment, about 2m down, indicating that a tsunami likely
washed over the area hundreds, or possibly thousands, of years ago.
The samples need further analysis but Mr Hamacher says it is a "very exciting" result that suggests the legend could be true.
Earlier
this year, another team of researchers presented a paper arguing that
stories from Australia's coastal Aboriginal communities might "represent
genuine and unique observations" of sea level rises that occurred
between 7,000 and 11,000 years ago.
