Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast

By John Feliks, PCN Nov/Dec 2016

Engineer, rock art researcher and preservationist, Ray Urbaniak— who has written in PCN about the generational potential of oral tradition regarding rock art— recommends a 2015 paper published in the Australian Geographer titled, “Aboriginal memories of inundation of the Australian coast dating from more than 7000 years ago.”

Various simplified renditions of the paper’s thesis can be found all over the Internet. They provide interesting support for Urbaniak’s ideas that various ‘enigmatic’ images in Southwest U.S. rock art could represent Ice Age mammals such as mammoths. The paper’s idea, that Aboriginals could have passed down over thousands of years and as far back as 18,000 years accurate information regarding sea level changes (see Fig. 1 as a visual aid) is well beyond what most anthropologists are conditioned to consider due to their training. Remember, whenever you hear any proclamations from anthropologists or paleontologists that prehistoric people were somehow less intelligent than we are today that this is a blinkered view perpetuated through repetition and the blockading of conflicting evidence. The suggestion of modern-level intelligence throughout human prehistory is an idea that is in conflict with evolutionary theory.