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Ancient Aust'n Aboriginal site could be "oldest observatory in the world": experts

Xinhua, October 13, 2016 Adjust font size:

Experts believe an ancient Aboriginal site in the Australian bush could be the oldest astronomical observatory in the world.

Scientists studying the Wurdi Yuang stone arrangement, at an undisclosed location in Victorian bushland, could be up to 11,000 years old, which would make it older than Stonehenge, a prehistoric rock arrangement in England, and the Great Pyramids of Giza.

Duane Hamacher, an expert in Indigenous astronomy from Monash University, said that the first Australians had complex knowledge of the solar system and the site could dispel the notion that all Aboriginal people were nomadic hunter-gatherers.

"They understood very well the motions of the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars throughout the year and over longer periods of time," Hamacher told the ABC on Thursday.

"White Australians don't generally recognize that the history of colonialism has erased that, so what we're doing is helping the communities piece that information back together.

"Some academics have referred to this stone arrangement here as Australia's version of Stonehenge.

"I think the question we might have to ask is: is Stonehenge Britain's version of Wurdi Yuang? Because this could be much, much older."

Reg Abrahams, the custodian of the site, said it could also be the place where agricultural practices, such as terrace farming, were first used in the world.

"You see a lot of agricultural and aquacultural practices, so evidence of this agriculture may go back tens of thousands of years, pre-dating what anthropologists commonly think of as the dawn of agriculture which is about 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia," Abrahams told the ABC on Thursday.

Abrahams said the land around the observatory, which is strewn with rocks believed to have been set out to map the movements of the sun, appears to have once had a village and farms on it.

"If you're going to have a stone arrangement where you mark off the seasons throughout the year with the solstices and equinoxes, it kind of makes sense if you're at least most of the year in one specific location to do that," he said. Endit