The Guardian's take on it:
Humans arrived in the arid interior of Australia 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, archaeologists working at a site in South Australia believe.
Researchers excavating a rock shelter in the Flinders Ranges have unearthed ancient artefacts dating from up to 49,000 years ago - just 1,000 years or so after humans arrived in Australia - including burnt eggshells and stone tools. A bone from a now-extinct creature known as a Diprotodon optatum - a huge wombat-like marsupial - was also retrieved, offering the clearest evidence yet that humans interacted with such creatures.
The discovery of some of the earliest artefacts of their kind in Australia, including certain stone and bone tools as well as red ochre and gypsum pigments, has challenged ideas of how and when such items came to be used.
“The old idea is that people might have come from the East, from the Levant, out of Africa, and these modern humans may have come with a package of innovative technologies,” said Giles Hamm, first author of the research from La Trobe University, Australia. “But the development of these fine stone tools, the bone technology, we think that happened as a local innovation, due to a local cultural evolution,” he added.
Published in the journal Nature, the research reveals evidence of human activity 49,000 years ago in the Warratyi rock shelter - a site, discovered by Hamm around five years ago.
Hamm believes the new findings point to humans rapidly moving south after their arrival in Australia, before becoming “trapped” in the Flinders Ranges as the aridity of the region increased - a situation that could have driven the development of new tools and practices.
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road