Axe-clusive Discovery: World’s Oldest Tool Found in Australia

The find is about the size of a thumbnail and looks very much like a typical old piece of rock. However, the researchers suggest it is a fragment of an axe used between 46,000 and 49,000 years ago — just around the time people first set foot on the continent. The fragment was excavated in the early 1990s from a cave in the Windjana Gorge national park in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and has recently been tested.

"Nowhere else in the world do you get axes at this date," said Professor Sue O'Connor from the Australian National University, who originally excavated the tool.

​The discovery showed early Aboriginal technology was not as simple as has been previously suggested — the tool had a handle attached, according to researches. The scientists say the axe was likely invented in Australia, as there is no evidence of similar tools being found in south-east Asia, from where humans arrived.

"It's a fascinating inversion of what European scholars thought in the 19th century. Their presumption was that all the innovations happened in Europe and far-flung places like Australia were simplistic and had little innovation. And it's turned out that there's a long history of discovery of axes of progressively earlier ages. This is the place where that sort of technology was invented and it only reached Europe relatively recently," said Peter Hiscock from the University of Sydney, who made the recent discovery.