Feature: Australia's Aboriginal Culture

Australia's Aboriginal culture probably represents the oldest surviving culture in the world, with the use of stone tool technology and painting with red ochre pigment dating back over 60,000 years. Australians never developed an "iron age", "bronze age", or pottery, and the terms "palaeolithic" (old stone age) and "neolithic" (new stone age) are not used in Australia, because stone technology did not progress in the same way as the rest of the world.
Humankind's most ancient stone tool technology, the percussion method of chipping away at the edge of a rock to make a sharp edge for cutting, dates back 2.5 million years, and was still practiced by Aborigines until the 1960s and later. Many stone choppers and flake scrapers commonly made until the last few decades are similar to these earliest tools. These flaked tools are used to shape wooden weapons and implements. The manufacture and use of ground edge axes, still occasionally made today, date back over 20,000 years on the northern mainland, and back to 40,000 years in Papua New Guinea, once attached to present day Australia. However, on present evidence, it appears that the manufacture of ground edge axes spread slowly south, dating back only 4,500 years in southern Australia, and not being used in Tasmania, which was cut off from the mainland by rising seas about 11,000 years ago.
A new technology, creating stone blades, was developed about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago and led to the addition of stone spear points, small stone spear barbs, and blade shaped stone knives and scrapers. >>>

Text: Australia's Aboriginal Culture