MessageToEagle.com - The rugged and remote Pilbara region, located about 1,300 kilometres north of Perth, Australia and covering some 500,000 square kilometres of land, is one of Australia's most fascinating places with traces of Earth's earliest life.
The ancient Pilbara's 2.5 billion year old landscape keeps many prehistoric secrets. Some of them have recently been unveiled by reseachers working in the area. Researchers collecting rock samples in Pilbara region have discovered a mineral - 'tranquillityite' -previously believed to exist only on the Moon.
Click on image to enlargeThis Burrup petroglyph may be one of the oldest carved faces in the world. (Credit: Ken Mulvaney).
The team from the University of Western Australia (UWA) and Curtin University in Perth found the mineral in Pilbara's dolerite rocks at six different sites in the state's north.
| The uranium-lead dating indicates that the Pilbara rocks containing tranquillityite were over 1 billion years old, about 200 million years older than other scientific estimates, reported Australian Geographic.Worth mentioning is also discovery of traces of bacteria that lived a record-breaking 3.49 billion years ago, a mere billion years after Earth formed.It's our planet's oldest fossils ever described and are our oldest ancestors, according to researchers. Unlike dinosaur bones, the newly identified fossils are not petrified body parts. They're textures on the surfaces of sandstone thought to be sculpted by once-living organisms. |
Click on image to enlargePilbara's engraved rocks
Australia’s most incredible, ancient Aboriginal engravings of human-like figures, animals (even creatures which have been extinct for about 3,000 years) and diverse human faces can be found in the Burrup Peninsula and surrounding Dampier Archipelago, Western Australia.Their number is estimated up to 1 million images! First, archaeologists estimated that some of these fascinating engravings to be up to 30,000 years old, but Professor Brad Pillans, a geologist at the Australian National University and his team took rock samples and measured the natural erosion rates of rock on the Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia.
The climate of the Dampier Archipelago is described as tropical semi-desert with low, annual rainfall and the high evaporation rate.The team’s results show that the area has some of the lowest erosion rates anywhere in the world, providing the perfect environment for preserving rock art. This could be attributed to the durability of the rock itself and the dry climate of the Burrup Peninsula.
"The combination of hard rock and a dry climate means that the engravings could be up to 60,000 years old. That spans the known history of human settlement in Australia and suggests that some of the oldest rock art in Australia, and indeed the world, could well be on open-air display in the Burrup,” Professor Brad Pillans explained.“As it turns out, the rocks on the Burrup Peninsula are extremely hard and are therefore very resistant to natural weathering processes,” Professor Pillans said.
“When I first visited the Burrup Peninsula, I was absolutely amazed by the sheer number and variety of Aboriginal rock art engravings. It’s estimated that there are up to one million images there, many of which are spectacular works of art. Given the extraordinary amount and diversity of the rock art and its potential antiquity, I rather hope the area will soon be nominated for World Heritage listing,” Professor Pillans said.The paper will be published in the June 2013 issue of Quaternary Science Reviews.Copyright @ MessageToEagle.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or part without the express written permission of MessageToEagle.com. See also:
Also see:
Millennia Old Stone Faces Of Unknown Origin: Who Carved Them And For What Purpose?
Controversial Artifacts No One Wants To Examine Thoroughly -Is There Something We Are Afraid Of Discovering?
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