Think about it. The claim that Aboriginal culture is 65,000 years old, and the world’s oldest continuing culture is extraordinary – given what is known about ancient peoples.

How do we know it was the same culture and the same people over 65,000 years? The earliest written records (Sumerian and Egyptian) go back no more than 3,400 years, and the first coherent records (Sumerian and Egyptian) are no more than 2,600 years old.

Of course, fossil traces of human existence go back thousands of years, but bits of bone say nothing specifically cultural. One can accept fossil traces of human existence have been found on the Australian continent, but that does not mean it was irrefutably the same people or exactly the same culture.

It does not assault reason to say Aboriginal culture, as found by the settlers in January 1788, may not have been more than a few thousand years old.