In 2022, western Yalanji traditional owners of the land and a Queensland technology consulting firm joined forces to use drones, artificial intelligence and mapping technology to establish if there are any more gallery paintings that have been lost to history. So far, 15 Quinkan rock art sites not previously known to have existed have been discovered. It seems the wild bush of this remote corner of Australia is far from finished when it comes to revealing its age-old secrets.
Arctic terGetty Images
The migration of the Arctic tern
Next time you’re stuck in a traffic jam or waiting for a delayed flight, take a moment to consider the annual journey of the Arctic tern. No creature on earth has a longer migration, flying 60,000 miles from the far north of Europe to the Antarctic and back again. They don’t even take the most direct route during their journey, making the distance they fly even further than that; nobody is quite sure how much.
What is certain is that the arctic tern’s migration is one of the longest of any animal on earth. But why? Scientists believe that the epic distances terns traverse are due to their need to escape both Arctic and Antarctic winters where food is scarce and there is no light. This means that during the mere two months in which they make the vast longitudinal journey, it’s possible to see Arctic terns in almost every continent, popping up from Tierra del Fuego to South Africa, while terns that hatched in Greenland have been sighted in Australia.
Great ZimbabweAlamy
Great Zimbabwe
Constructed a thousand years ago, Great Zimbabwe was one of the very first truly international trading hubs. However, since its re-discovery, archaeologists have been obsessed with attributing its construction to Phoenicians, Babylonians, or, indeed, it seems, almost anyone except Africans themselves.
Thankfully, the pure weight of scientific evidence shows that Great Zimbabwe’s 32-foot-high stone walls were constructed by Indigenous hands and were home to thousands of people. Situated near gold fields, this was one of the fulcrums of a mercantile network that stretched up the East African coast and over to Arabia, Persia and China.
Nobody is certain why Great Zimbabwe appears to have been abandoned in about 1450. Some assume that it was due to the gold fields becoming exhausted. What is certain is that the prejudice of the colonial era, with its false narrative that the splendour of Great Zimbabwe could possibly have been built by an African community, has long been banished. A thousand years on from its conception, Great Zimbabwe is proof indeed that modern ideas of civilisation, community and commerce are far from being Western creations.
