Ruins of an ancient city have been unearthed in Australia’s Northern Territory after a major magnitude 6.2 earthquake hit the region last week.
Archaeologists from the University of Adelaide were notified after strange-looking structures were discovered by locals recently unearthed since the area has been struck by a major earthquake last week.
“This is a amazing discovery. The area is about 50 kilometers off to the North West of Uluru National Park, where Aborigines have long talked about a previous civilization to theirs populating the region, but it was always believed to be more of a myth than fact” acknowledges professor at the Department of Archeology, Adam Goldstein.
“The strangest discovery above all is that of a wooden boat made of red cedar. It is hard to understand how such a vessel could have made the trip here as we are hundreds of miles off the nearest coastline” he adds, visibly intrigued.
Although other recent findings in the region also point out to a previous highly complex Uluru civilization in the region, not all scholars agree to what the findings really mean.
“We’ve been taught that the native Aborigines lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for thousand of years. Maybe it’s part of our heritage of colonialism, but recent archeological evidence in the region points out more and more towards a highly developed megalithic civilization, even possibly a sea-faring civilization which possibly traded and expanded beyond the Australian continent” explains Sydney-based Museologist, Sean Sullivan.
The discovery of Phoenician-styled pottery in a grotto last year even led some scholars to hypothesize that ancient seafarers coming as far as ancient Egypt, such as the Phoenicians, could have wandered as far as Australia at the time.
Anthropologist Jane Ruth at the University of Sidney said: “The Aborigines tell of a time, the Dreamtime they call it, where the continent was submerged with water. During this Dreamtime, tribes from all over the sea, and of the five colored nations, lived in harmony and prospered together. All this disappeared after a great cataclysm brought on by the mythical Rainbow Serpent God, who in a great flash of light, as strong as a thousand lightning bolts, stole all the water of the Earth and left nothing behind,” she explains.
Australia is home to the largest clusters of meteorite craters in the world. The rich iron content of the meteorites has left its mark on the land giving it a red hue due to oxidation. Two deep scars in the earth’s crust in outback Australia mark the remains of a meteorite crater with a 250-mile diameter – the largest ever found.
