Thanks for your kind remarks professor. I hope you don't regret your request for more ... LOL
Australia, as is starting to become apparent, may hold the earliest recorded history of homo Sapiens. 40,000 BP is now a given. 60,000 BP is looking like a good possibility, but while there is plenty of evidence for 60K so far no stratigraphic evidence has been found. Stratigraphic evidence is found in documenting the layers of cave floors. Unfortunately the Aboriginals did not live in caves but only used them as temporary shelters in times of need so that it is very difficult to find lithics in the 60K layers.
Plenty of stone tools and such that are considered to be 60K have been found as surface finds but until they can be stratigrapically located it is not firm evidence. It appears that Homo Sapiens was living in Australia at the same time as Neanderthal occupied Europe.
From 'The Prehistory of Australia' by Mulvaney & Kamminga
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..located a second human burial half a kilometre to the east, recently exposed to heavy rainfall. These remains were called Lake Mungo 3. The position of the shallow grave beneath the dune's upper Mungo Unit suggested an age of 28,000 to 30,000 years BP. Within this grave the body had been laid out with hands clasped together and knees slightly flexed, ochre daubed generously on the body had stained the sand of the grave fill a pink colour.
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Lake Mungo is a lake that has been dry for 15000+ years. The bed of the lake has been blown to the eastern shore and forms a gigantic sand dune 18klms long and a 100m or so high. Its like walking on the moon ... a weird and eerie but beautiful place. This guy has been laying there in his grave for
25000 years before they started the first pyramid in Egypt.
Here is a description of the Wilgie Mia Ochre Mine which may have been mined for the
past 40,000 years, this one in particular supplied most of the ochre used throughout the western half of Australia
Quote:
the quarry represents the removal of many thousands of tonnes of rock. There is evidence that wooden scaffolds were propped against the rock face to provide access to some of the rock seams. The floor of the main pit is stratified to a depth of six metres, with quarrying tools preserved throughout the deposit. Heavy stones were used like mauls to batter the rock, and fire hardened wooden wedges, about half a metre long, prised out the ochre.
Wilgie Mia represented the blood of a dreaming kangaroo creation being. It was extensively traded throughout Western Australia and possibly even as far as Queensland (3000 klm away) Although Wilgie Mia may have been mined for thousands of years, it is not exhausted yet. That such tonnage extraction of Ochre was not exceptional is indicated by other evidence. Scientific Excavations in 1958 at Yarar rockshelter in the Northern Territory recovered 20,000 pieces of ochre, weighing 183 kilograms (about 400 US pounds) from 25 cubic metres of deposit.
Dierie people from Cooper Creek are known to have travelled 500 kilometres annually to collect ochre from the Bookartoo (Parachilna) quarry in the northern Flinders Ranges. In these annual expeditions more than 70 men each returned with 30 kilograms (about 65 pound) loads of ochre
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Here are 2 really old hand prints almost totally covered by thousands of years patination.
They just may be the two oldest handprints on the Planet Earth !! 
Below is a very small picture of me in the rockshelter where the two prints are. LOL
cool bananas ... and enjoy .. greg
