Latest news with #Aborigines
Yahoo
a day ago
- Science
- Yahoo
The boomerang is European, not Australian, study suggests
They are the quintessential hunting weapons of the Australian Outback, long thought to be a unique product of Aboriginal ingenuity. But now archaeologists have found that boomerangs were being wielded in prehistoric Europe thousands of years earlier than the Antipodean examples. A mammoth tusk boomerang dating from about 40,000 years ago has been discovered in Oblazowa Cave in southern Poland, the oldest ever found. The earliest Australian boomerangs found in Wyrie Swamp, South Australia, in 1973 date to about 10,000 years ago. Rock art paintings from Kimberley in Western Australia suggest the weapons were being used 20,000 years ago, but there is no evidence for their earlier use. Prof Pawel Valde-Nowak, of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, said: 'The Oblazowa specimen meets all the parameters of a Queensland-type boomerang used by the Aborigines. 'It is currently the oldest boomerang in the world. It can be cautiously assumed that the boomerang was known in different parts of the world in the past.' The researchers say the find is unusual because it was widely believed that Aboriginal hunter-gatherers invented the first boomerangs thousands of years ago as toys and weapons for survival in the challenging Australian environment For Aboriginal communities, boomerangs are as old as time itself, featuring in their 'Dreaming' creation myths when ancestral spirits roamed the Earth. According to legend, during the Dreamtime, rivers, rock formations and mountains were created when ancestral spirits threw boomerangs and spears into the ground. The boomerang's ability to return was believed to be a powerful symbol that represented the cyclical nature of time, and they were used to hunt birds, small mammals and fish. The mammoth tusk boomerang was found in a cave in the western Carpathian Mountains above the Białka river, and radiocarbon dating shows it was made about 42,290 to 39,380 years ago. No ivory fragments were found at the site, suggesting the boomerang must have been crafted elsewhere and carried to Obłazowa Cave, underscoring its special status, the researchers said. Experimental work has demonstrated its capability to fly. Prehistoric boomerangs have been found in Europe including a wooden example from Jutland dating from about 7,000 years ago, while in North Africa, hunters are depicted in rock art wielding boomerangs from about 8,500 years ago. Ivory boomerangs were also found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, which dates from 1,323BC. Boomerangs are thought to have developed from throwing sticks, the earliest examples of which date from about 300,000 years ago and were found in Germany. Over time, it is likely that craftsmen realised making the stick curved creates greater lift as it moves through the air, allowing it to fly for longer. Not all boomerangs are designed to return to the thrower. Although the boomerangs were developed for hunting, over time they became multi-purpose tools, used for butchering animals, digging and scraping hot ashes, and even producing music when struck together. The authors conclude: 'The dispersed nature of the evidence suggests that while the boomerang was not a ubiquitous tool, its presence across various cultures likely reflects independent innovations rather than direct transmission, demonstrating its adaptability to different environmental and cultural contexts. 'These findings offer valuable insights into early human technological innovation, revealing the creative solutions societies developed to address their needs across time and space.' The research was published in the journal Plos One. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Rakyat Post
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Rakyat Post
Knowing The History Of Israel-Palestine: Injustice From The start
Subscribe to our FREE This article first appeared in 'Europeans needed land, the indigenous population resisted its seizure, and so they were exterminated.' 'Settler colonialism destroys to replace.' These quotes put in a nutshell what has been going on in Palestine for almost a century, driven by Zionism, the founding ideology of the state of Israel, which is now committing a genocide in Gaza. The first quote is from Kehinde Andrews' The New Age of Empire. The second is from Patrick Wolfe's article 'Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native' in the Journal of Genocide Research. Wolfe also quotes Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism: 'If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.' We need to face the issue in front of us – a genocide of a people is taking place in Gaza against the background of settler-colonialism and racism. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) refers to it as 'plausible genocide'. The ICJ is a court of law and, yes, we can imagine how the judges have to wring their legal hands to determine if it is indeed genocide. But while the wringing goes on children, women, civilians are dying, starving and malnourished from indiscriminate bombing and forced blockades of food and supplies. We have to go beyond the wringing. There was no court to wring its hands while 99% of the natives died in what ended up as the genocide of the Americas. There was no court to wring its hands when only about 75,000 Aborigines were left in 1900 out of about one million in 1788, when the British first arrived, leading to the genocide of the natives of Australia. Surely, we cannot repeat such wringing only to then have history catch up and then find that – oh, umm, in the end the Palestinian population did suffer a genocide at the hands of the Israelis. As the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says, 'While States debate terminology – is it or is it not genocide? – Israel continues its relentless destruction of life in Gaza, through attacks by land, air and sea, displacing and massacring the surviving population with impunity.' (End unfolding genocide or watch it end life in Gaza: UN experts say States face defining choice | OHCHR). It is instructive that the concept of a genocide was not conceived of in the West until it happened to white Europeans in Europe itself (ie the Nazi Holocaust). As Kehinde Andrews points out: 'The fact that the term genocide only came to exist in the West during the [Nazi] Holocaust is testament enough to the problem. Systematic killing of hundreds of millions of 'savages' in the colonies did not merit the creation of a new concept.' Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a penchant for describing Israel's so-called 'war' against Hamas as being one between civilisation and barbarism, seeing Israel at the front line of that battle. The message is that Israel is fighting that civilisational war as the representative of the modern civilised (read Western) world in a region that is inherently lacking in civilisation. But given the unfettered prolonged bombings, given the wilful starvation of a whole population as a weapon of war, who really are the barbarians? It is easy to say that the issue is complicated, or to wave things off because the Middle East is always fighting anyway, or to say we cannot do anything. There are actually things we can do – boycott Israel-complicit products and services, talk about the injustice, write to the US embassy, protest, march… But one fundamental thing we should also do is to know the history of the problem. This is important so that we do not just see each episode of violence as just another episode but as part of a long train of ongoing historical injustice. We too were colonised and have been subject to racism. We should thus be better able to empathise with the Palestinians who, to this day, still face the violent end of it all and are fighting for their survival, dignity, freedom and self-determination. Injustice from the start The state of Israel was formed on the basis of a UN partition plan adopted by a resolution of the UN General Assembly on 29 November 1947. At that time, the indigenous Palestinians made up a two-thirds' majority of the population while a third were Jewish newcomers who owned less than 6% of the total land area. Yet, Resolution 181 of November 1947 granted 56% of the land to the minority Jewish settlers and just 42% to the majority native Palestinians. On that basis, the state of Israel was established on 15 May 1948. The division of the land was completely disproportionate to the demographic realities on the ground. This was driven partly by a desire to compensate the Jews for the Nazi Holocaust in Europe. We can see how fundamentally unjust this was, especially from the perspective of the Palestinian natives of the land. Your land is partitioned without your consent with a disproportionate majority portion given to newly arrived settlers, to compensate them for a genocide they suffered in Europe that had nothing to do with you. It is no wonder that such an unjust and ill-conceived plan sparked protest actions leading to what became known as the first Arab-Israeli war. The dispossession of the Palestinians had begun. Just one day after UN Resolution 181, organised fear, militia violence and expulsions started to be employed against the Palestinians. This was carried out by Zionist paramilitary groups with a series of attacks on Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods. These initial Zionist assaults were severe enough to cause the displacement of almost 75,000 people. This was the start of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine – well before the Zionist state of Israel was proclaimed in May 1948. On 10 March 1948 the infamous 'Plan Dalet' was adopted by the Zionist leadership. This was a plan to ethnically cleanse the country to make it as fully Jewish as possible, with as few Palestinians as possible. It led to the uprooting of Palestinians from urban centres accompanied by massacres (most notably, at Deir Yassin). This was the unfolding of the Nakba of 1948, described by Rashid Khalidi in his highly accessible book The Hundred Years' War on Palestineas a 'seemingly endless train wreck'. By the end of the first phase of the Nakba – before Israel's founding on 15 May 1948 – about 300,000 Palestinians had been displaced and key economic, civic and cultural centres had been devastated. The second phase, following 15 May, saw the defeat of weak Arab armies and further expulsions and massacres resulting in the displacement of another 400,000 people – a total of about 700,000 native Palestinian inhabitants. (The Nakba has never ended and continues with the ongoing displacement of Palestinians over the whole of the occupied territory of Palestine with its worst manifestation in Gaza today.) Through the use of armed force, the original 56% allocated to Israel under the UN partition plan was increased to 78% and was never reversed. The series of events that has led to the historical injustice of the case of Palestine was spearheaded by premeditated ethnic cleansing. Ilan Pappe's authoritative work The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine draws on the Israeli military archives, Zionist leaders' diaries, their minutes of meetings and Palestinian historical sources. It establishes a 'clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation … regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity'. It is revealing that David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister, wrote to his son in 1937: 'The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as war.' As we have seen above, war he did make with the establishment of the state of Israel 11 years later in 1948. The underlying idea that 'the Arabs will have to go' has remained part of Israel's existence, with the right-wing government today being explicit about it. -By Tong Veng Wye, Aliran member. Share your thoughts with us via TRP's . Get more stories like this to your inbox by signing up for our newsletter.
Perth Now
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Perth Now
Massacre order poster on coloniser statue in court test
Pasting a piece of paper to a controversial former governor's statue is not protected by freedom of political communication, a judge has ruled. Activist Stephen Langford stuck a piece of A4 paper with former NSW governor Lachlan Macquarie's 1816 order to imprison and kill First Australians on a statue of the man himself located in Hyde Park. The message stuck on the statue quoted from the order and read "all Aborigines from Sydney onwards are to be made prisoners of war and if they resist they are to be shot and their bodies to be hung from trees in the most conspicuous places near where they fall so as to strike fear into the hearts of surviving natives". Langford had been found guilty on seven charges of affixing a placard or paper on premises without consent at the Downing Centre Local Court, before appealing that verdict. But Judge Christine Mendes dismissed that appeal in the District Court on Thursday, declaring an implied constitutional right of freedom of political communication did not mean the law could be ignored. Archival records show Macquarie's military actions included the slaughter of Aboriginal people including women and children, with little regard for human life or the rules of combat. Yet the statue describes him as a "perfect gentleman". Langford said the court decision was "unsatisfactory" and he remained "enraged" by the statue. "There remains rubbish information on the statue, it's just lauding him," he told AAP. "I'm not saying he was the worst in the world … but on a statue you have the truth, not bloody bollocks." Judge Mendes found free political communication did not deny lawmakers the right to sanction trespassers in order to protect public property. But she accepted his rights had been burdened by the law and acknowledged his stance as "commendable". "For many citizens, Mr Langford's interest in raising public awareness about the legacy of Australia's colonial history and the absence of First Nations perspectives of history in the public domain is highly commendable," Judge Mendes said. Wiradjuri woman Yvonne Weldon, the first Aboriginal councillor in the City of Sydney's 180-year history, said she stood with Langford and commended his advocacy. "There is not a single publicly funded statue commemorating a First Nations person in the City of Sydney … meanwhile there are more than two dozen statues around the city centre commemorating colonial figures," she said. "This imbalance is unacceptable and it reflects the erasure of First Nations history, culture and perspectives more broadly." In 2023, Cr Weldon pushed for a review of inscriptions on 25 statues to address offensive descriptions of colonial figures' deeds. But Langford said no council action had followed. "Nothing has happened, that's my main beef," he said. "It's meant to be democratic what we have at town hall … I'm asking them to put the truth on the statues." Lilli Barto, who was one of a group of supporters with Langford in court, said the outcome showed the priorities of the "colonial legal system". "The state would rather expend months worth of police resources and court resources prosecuting a man over a glue stick and a bit of paper ... than to just change the plaque on the statue and actually acknowledge the violence," she told AAP. Judge Mendes dismissed Langford's charges without conviction.
Gulf Today
04-05-2025
- Politics
- Gulf Today
Labour's win in Australia a rejection of Trump agenda
The Labour Party has been re-elected in the Australian parliamentary election. The preliminary results showed that it won 77 of the 150 seats, while the opposition Liberals managed to get 34. Labour leader and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in his victory speech, 'In this time of global uncertainty, Australians have chosen optimism and determination. Australians have chosen to face global challenges the Australian way looking after each other while building for the future.' As in the Canadian election, the Australian Liberals, with their conservative credentials, hoped to make it back to power after they lost office in the 2022 election. They were in power for nine years. Liberal leader Peter Dutton had conceded defeat and congratulated Albanese. He is also the first opposition leader to lose his own seat in the federal election. Liberal leader and Senator James Paterson referred to the 'Trump factor' in the Australian election. He said, 'It was devastating in Canada for the conservatives...I think it has been a factor here, but how big a factor will be determined in a few hours' time.' The agenda on which Albanese and the Labour won the election is opposite that of Trump. Albanese has promised to extend Medicare, help home-buyers with a subsidy, and he acknowledged the Aborigines, the people who lived in Australia for thousands of years before British colonialism started in the late 18th century. Albanese said, '...and I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we stand.' The Aborigines have been demanding that they should be recognised as the First Nations in the Constitutions, and they be given representation in parliament. There was a referendum on the issue last October and it did not get the required majority. The political leaders are quite sensitive to the demand. Albanese' assertion is a show of deep sympathy and support for the rights and demands of the Aborigines people in the country. Albanese and the Labour Party rode back to power on the welfare plank, which the conservatives all over the world have been pooh-poohing in many countries of Europe and in the United States through Trump's presidential victory last November. But the election results in Canada and Australia have shown that the welfare state politics are not dead, and people welcome state support on health, education, and in Australia, help in buying a home. Social security has become a scorned term in the wake of Trump's success, but it is clear that this is not so everywhere. There are poor people and the not-so-rich who need the helping hand of the state, and free markets cannot be trusted to deliver to the majority of people their basic needs. The return of Labour to power in Australia also means that Australia will broadly remain the ally of the United States in the Asia-Pacific through the security alliance of Australia, United Kingdom and the United States (AUKUS), and also through the QUAD, comprising the United States, India, Japan and Australia, which is considered to be an anti-China grouping. But individually, all the four countries are dealing with China on their own, and they have their own equation with Beijing. Albanese recognises the importance of China for his country, and he has been pragmatic enough to push for better trade relations with China. Australia benefits hugely from exports of beef and wine to China. Unlike the United Kingdom, which has been toeing a soft line towards President Trump's tariff policies, Albanese has been clear that the 10 per cent tariff on Australian exports to the US is not the gesture of a friend. So, when it comes to defending the interests of Australia, Albanese will steer an independent line like his Canadian counterpart Mark Carney.
