Inside Australia's oldest and coldest short-stay accommodation
Long before Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson crossed NSW's Blue Mountains, First Nations peoples braved its frozen ground in the last ice age to socialise or trade.
They would stop for a night or two and catch up with old friends, having climbed above the treeline and down gullies to seek cold comfort in a cathedral-like cave that archaeologists say is the oldest high mountain site continually occupied by humans in Australia.
Australian research published in Nature Human Behaviour on Tuesday has found evidence that 20,000 years ago, groups of people stopped in the cave – Dargan Shelter near Lithgow, NSW – to warm up in front of a fire, make tools, discuss business or do some matchmaking on the way to a corroboree in the mountains.
'It was short-stay accommodation ... on the way to business,' said University of Sydney archaeologist, cave art specialist and Gomeroi man, Wayne Brennan.
It's still being used that way today. Located on a private property not far from Lithgow, known as Hatters Hideout Cave and Lodge, the cave is sometimes rented to small groups of campers. Owner Mark O'Carrigan said: 'It's the original Airbnb.'
The archaeological dig found evidence of human occupation from the Late Pleistocene (last ice age) to the recent past. This included 693 artefacts, and faded rock art including a stencil of a child-sized hand that is still visible.
The findings upend conventional wisdom. Far from inhospitable glacial landscapes stopping First Nations people from travelling, as previously thought, global research has found people travelled and gathered in high-altitude sites (such as Dargan at 1073 metres elevation) where water would have been frozen for much of the year.
The lead author of the paper, University of Sydney archaeology lecturer Dr Amy Mosig Way, said Dargan is a significant site. Funded by the Australian Museum Foundation, the research was initiated by Brennan and Way to bring archaeologists and Indigenous knowledge keepers together.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sydney Morning Herald
4 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Surge in satellite launches and space tourism thins ozone layer
A tenfold surge in rockets to launch satellites – and at least one joyride bearing Katy Perry and friends – could damage the most successful international environmental treaty in history, the global agreement to repair damage to the ozone layer. Historically, space flight has had little impact on the Earth's weather and climate systems. But the recent surge in rocket launches – and the huge increase expected in the coming years – is now causing some scientists concern. The first orbital rocket was launched in 1957. Last year, a record 263 orbital space flights were launched, shattering previous records set in 2023 and 2022. By 2030, over 2000 launches per year could be taking place as Elon Musk's SpaceX seeks to build and maintain a constellation of up to 42,000 communications satellites (each of which has a life expectancy of around five years), nation states continue with their space programs and launch military satellites, and space tourism increases apace. Chlorine and soot released into the upper atmosphere from the rockets can damage the ozone layer enough to stall the slow repair of the ozone layer, the strata of ozone-rich atmosphere 15 to 30 kilometres above the Earth's surface that serves as a shield against harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Scientists observed in 1974 that this layer was being depleted by the common use of chlorofluorocarbons in refrigeration and as a propellant for aerosol containers. In 1987, the United Nations Montreal Protocol was signed, phasing out the use of the chemicals, and since then, the ozone layer has slowly started to heal. The agreement has been celebrated as the most successful environmental treaty in history. But a paper published this month in Nature warns that once rates of orbital launches reach 2000 a year, the current healing of the ozone layer will slow, particularly over Antarctica. To calculate the potential impact of future launches, scientists built a database of ozone-depleting chemicals emitted by rockets currently in use and fed the information into a model of Earth's atmosphere and climate. They found that with around 2000 launches per year the ozone layer would thin by up to 3 per cent, with a higher rate of loss over Antarctica.
The Age
4 hours ago
- The Age
Surge in satellite launches and space tourism thins ozone layer
A tenfold surge in rockets to launch satellites – and at least one joyride bearing Katy Perry and friends – could damage the most successful international environmental treaty in history, the global agreement to repair damage to the ozone layer. Historically, space flight has had little impact on the Earth's weather and climate systems. But the recent surge in rocket launches – and the huge increase expected in the coming years – is now causing some scientists concern. The first orbital rocket was launched in 1957. Last year, a record 263 orbital space flights were launched, shattering previous records set in 2023 and 2022. By 2030, over 2000 launches per year could be taking place as Elon Musk's SpaceX seeks to build and maintain a constellation of up to 42,000 communications satellites (each of which has a life expectancy of around five years), nation states continue with their space programs and launch military satellites, and space tourism increases apace. Chlorine and soot released into the upper atmosphere from the rockets can damage the ozone layer enough to stall the slow repair of the ozone layer, the strata of ozone-rich atmosphere 15 to 30 kilometres above the Earth's surface that serves as a shield against harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Scientists observed in 1974 that this layer was being depleted by the common use of chlorofluorocarbons in refrigeration and as a propellant for aerosol containers. In 1987, the United Nations Montreal Protocol was signed, phasing out the use of the chemicals, and since then, the ozone layer has slowly started to heal. The agreement has been celebrated as the most successful environmental treaty in history. But a paper published this month in Nature warns that once rates of orbital launches reach 2000 a year, the current healing of the ozone layer will slow, particularly over Antarctica. To calculate the potential impact of future launches, scientists built a database of ozone-depleting chemicals emitted by rockets currently in use and fed the information into a model of Earth's atmosphere and climate. They found that with around 2000 launches per year the ozone layer would thin by up to 3 per cent, with a higher rate of loss over Antarctica.
Sydney Morning Herald
13 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Choosing the sex of an IVF baby is banned. Should it be?
'I'm here to promote awareness for the availability of gender selection and to hopefully ignite some conversation so that perhaps in the future, people won't have to travel to the United States to have this done,' Potter says. What are the rules and the concerns behind them? The National Health and Medical Research Council reviewed their guidelines on assisted reproductive technology in 2017 and upheld its view that sex selection should not be used unless to reduce the risk of a genetic disease. (Duchenne muscular dystrophy, for example, mostly affects males.) One of the concerns cited by the NHMRC's ethics committee was that nonmedical sex selection could lead to people favouring one sex over the other based on cultural or personal biases. What the NHMRC considered in its ban on sex selection Whether sex selection is a justifiable use of medical resources. Whether there's an ethical difference between people wanting sex-balanced families and people choosing a particular sex due to personal or cultural bias. The possibility that sex selection my validate or reinforce gender stereotyping and discriminatory attitudes, and create pressure on the person born to conform to their parents' gender expectations. The possibility that sex selection may open the way for selecting other characteristics such as eye or hair colour. Concerns that people may be terminating pregnancies as an alternative sex-selection technique. Concerns Australians seeking sex selection could be travelling to international clinics with a lower standard of care. Values inherent in Australian society that relate to freedom and autonomy, particularly in relation to reproductive choices. Read the full reasoning behind the guidelines. The imbalance of the sex ratio in China is often cited as an example of cultural bias favouring male babies; in 2004 there were 121 males to every 100 females, at least partly because sons were preferred, so female fetuses were more likely to be aborted. China's sex ratio has since evened out, but there's still a male skew. Choosing the sex of an embryo to 'balance' a family's split between male and female children is one of the most common reasons people seek out sex selection, and it's viewed as more ethically acceptable. Alex Polyakov, an associate professor at the University of Melbourne and medical director of Melbourne's Genea IVF clinic, believes couples should be able to choose the sex of their third child, as long as their first two children are of the same sex. 'I think the argument that it will skew the sex ratio is really quite nonsensical,' he added, arguing the proportion of people taking part in sex selection would have to be huge to have such an effect. 'I don't really see an ethical or moral issue if safeguards are put in place.' By the same token, Polyakov has also warned embryo testing and selection strategies can decrease chance of pregnancy or lead to the discarding of healthy embryos, which in some cases has risked parents missing out on biological parenthood altogether. 'I think we often forget that the overriding aim is to increase the pregnancy rate, to get someone pregnant as soon as possible,' he says. Do people choose more males over females? Data is mixed on whether people are more likely to choose male or female embryos. An analysis of about 2300 embryo transfers at a US IVF clinic between 2012 and 2021 found 56.5 per cent of people who opted for sex selection chose male embryos. A study on a different hospital found roughly equal rates of sex selection when it was someone's first child, but a 59 per cent preference for females on the second child. Potter said about 70 per cent of his clients request female embryos, often driven by women who wanted a mother-daughter relationship. 'This process is driven by the female partner in most cases. For a lot of women, they've been imagining having a daughter ever since they were playing with dolls and modelling parenting behaviour as a child,' he says. Sex v gender Bioethicist Dr Tamara Browne, a senior lecturer in health ethics at Deakin University, says she's sad this debate has rekindled. 'We really haven't gotten very far when it comes to counteracting gender stereotypes and achieving gender equality,' she says. 'The two are interlinked, and I've become even more convinced that if we're to achieve gender equality, we have to stop parenting children differently according to their sex.' Assuming daughters will be closer to their mothers, or that boys offer different, more 'macho' experiences such as being into sport, plays into outdated gender beliefs, Browne says. Loading 'We don't have any good scientific evidence that you can only get these sorts of parenting experiences with a child of a certain sex,' she says. She makes the point that sex selection allows people to choose the sex chromosomes and genitalia of their child. It can't decide a child's gender – the way they express that sex. How, Browne argues, do we expect more men to take up nursing or childcare roles, and women to take up STEM subjects like maths and engineering, if we reinforce the idea they're born with different traits and abilities and therefore should be parented differently? I also ask Potter if he ever discusses with his clients the chance that a child born from a sex-selected embryo could eventually embrace a different gender identity – for example, a baby born from a female embryo who grows up as a trans man. (About 5 per cent of Americans under 30 say their gender is different to the sex they were assigned at birth, according to Pew Research Centre.) 'There would be no reason to discuss that, any more than it would be to discuss with an expecting mum,' Potter says. 'It's a pretty unlikely thing and kind of a grim topic.' How much should it cost? Dr Hilary Bowman-Smart, a research fellow at the University of South Australia who has studied prenatal testing, thinks sex selection in embryos isn't a particularly valuable use of medical resources, but the current reasons to keep it illegal were not compelling. Loading Bowman-Smart is concerned, though, about companies making money from sex selection services. 'I would be concerned about this becoming an expensive service that is advertised to people during a vulnerable time in their lives who otherwise might not have cared too much either way,' she says. While Polyakov backs sex selection in some circumstances, he doesn't believe it should be covered by Medicare. If it were legalised in Australia he estimates the practice would cost about $500 to $700 per embryo. 'So if you have 10 embryos, that adds about $5000 to $7000,' on top of the existing costs, he says.
