The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) has contributed to research building a record of rainfall dating back 65,000 years.
The research also sheds light on the strategies of Indigenous Australians to cope with a changing landscape.
The project, which also involved the University of Queensland (UQ) and the Mirarr Traditional Owners in northern Australia, has built a record of rainfall during the late Pleistocene and Holocene geological epochs.
Ancient food scraps found at Australia’s earliest known site of human occupation, in the Kakadu region, have helped researchers generate the rainfall records.
The research, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, provides a unique glimpse into the region’s climate at the time when people first entered the continent from the north.
Using the nutshell of anyakngarra — also known as pandanus — a team of researchers led by Anna Florin of UQ, worked alongside Mirarr Traditional Owners to develop a novel method to investigate past rainfall.
Samples of pandanus spiralis were collected from 24 sites between Darwin and Katherine and shipped to ANSTO where chemist, Linda Barry undertook all the stable carbon isotope analysis to test whether the modern pandanus nutshells were good indicators of water availability in the area.
Once this was established, measurements of stable carbon isotopic values from archaeological pandanus nutshells were then used to reconstruct palaeo-precipitation, an approach that is a potential game changer for palaeo-ecological and archaeological work in Australia.
