18,000 year old Amazon princess & her treasure

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Back when Indonesia was part of Australia, a young woman left treasure in a cave.

SHE was tall and strong and in her late 20s when she died about 18,000 years ago. Her teeth were not worn down, so she had probably enjoyed a diet of wallaby and other animals rather than chewing on tough plants. And from the unusual holes in some of her bones, it is possible that cancerous growths contributed to her early demise.

Named after the limestone cave where she was found, Lemdubu Woman and her burial site provide a unique insight into life in the north of the continent during the last glacial maximum, when Australia was much colder and drier.

Her skeleton has now been studied in more detail than any other remains from this period.

Today, Lemdubu Cave sits amid the dense rainforest of the Aru islands in Indonesia. But at the time the young woman died, sea levels were at their lowest because the ice sheets were at their greatest extent, and the Aru islands were part of a bigger Australian land mass, called Sahulland, that included New Guinea and Tasmania.

A Canberra archaeologist, Dr Susan O'Connor, says Lemdubu Cave is the most remote location in which she has undertaken excavations. A long canoe trip inland followed by three hours of trekking through thick vegetation was required to reach the site where she discovered the skeleton several years ago with colleagues Professor Matthew Spriggs, also of the Australian National University, and Associate Professor Peter Veth, of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

"In such a remote location, when you're excavating you have no idea how old the material is," O'Connor says. But the archaeologists were confident they had made a significant find when they also uncovered bones from agile wallabies and pollens from grasses which indicated that the climate, landscape and fauna had been very different when Lemdubu woman was alive.

Back in Australia the 394 fragments of skeleton were painstakingly pieced together by an ANU researcher, Dr David Bulbeck, who described his findings last week at the Australian Archaeological Association conference in Jindabyne.

The use of the cave site has been dated as stretching from about 27,000 to 12,000 years ago, with the burial site dated at 18,000 to 16,000 years ago.

View: Full Article | Source: The Sydney Morning Herald.