Original subtitles

We acknowledge the many First Nations across the country

and their elders and knowledge holders

who have generously shared their stories

and welcomed us onto their country for this series.

And we would like to warn Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers

that the following program may contain images and voices

of deceased persons.

The story of human history raises many great questions.

Perhaps the greatest question is why do some societies succeed

while others fail?

Australia is home to the world's oldest living culture,

which begs the question - what are the secrets to a society

which has endured longer than any other?

The First Australians had to organise themselves.

They built systems that would not only sustain them locally,

but would facilitate trade, travel and the exchange of ideas

across vast distances.

The ancestors invented communication networks

spanning thousands of kilometres.

A message stick gave you free passage

through different clan territories.

Complex societies

organised through mathematical genius.

This is a really optimised system.

Trade routes and superhighways

moving goods across the continent.

Using a supercomputer, we ran 125 billion pathways

through Australia.

And creating roads all Australians rely on today.

What our ancestors invented

was a sophisticated and robust civilisation,

and a deeply connected continent.

Australia is absolutely vast.

So big, it's hard to get your head around.

So imagine yourself back in time.

It seems almost impossible

that people thousands of kilometres apart

could be connected to each other.

Not so long ago, history books described small groups

of isolated people that knew little beyond the land that they roamed

or the neighbours that they kept.

Today, we know that First Nations people routinely travelled hundreds,

even thousands of kilometres for meetings, migration,

diplomacy and trade.

But let's start with a story that's even bigger.

When Europeans first arrived to the continent,

they thought it was completely cut off from the rest of the world

since the beginning of time.

Archaeologists are now proving them wrong.

30 kilometres off the Queensland coast,

on Jiigurru, also known as Lizard Island,

archaeologists are hunting for evidence

of an offshore trade route as old as the Silk Road.

Hey, Ben, before we go in,

I'll just sing it to the old people and let them know, hey?

Fantastic. (SPEAKS INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE)

Can you explain why you sing out to country?

Yeah, just let them know we've got our friend here,

bringing him in to see...

..see country where the dig's taking place.

Traditional owners Lewis, Charlie and Kenneth McLean

have granted journalist Ben Abbatangelo

privileged access to the dig site.

We're at 40cm now.

The further it goes down,

there's gonna be more artefacts there.

The excavation was sparked by a discovery

archaeologists never expected here in Australia pottery shards.

MAN: Pottery is not meant to be here.

The traditional ways that Europeans have written

the history of Australia

says that First Nations Australians didn't make pottery.

Well, we're showing that that is absolutely wrong.

Pottery shards found in the nearby lagoon

are strikingly similar to fragments found on the Papua New Guinea coast,

which date back almost 3,000 years.

Archaeologists believe this could be evidence of an offshore trade route.

Sometime between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago,

there's this whole sort of culture of pottery making ideas

that have been sort of moved along the coast,

literally over thousands of kilometres,

and now these ideas are coming down the Queensland coast.

The route stretches 3,500 kilometres around the Coral Sea.

But to confirm this radical theory, more artefacts need to be found.

How are you? Good. How are you?

This looks meticulous.

How long have you been in the pit for?

A couple of hours.

It takes 2 to 3 hours to excavate a single excavation unit.

So there's 2cm layers, and we sort of rotate out

and take turns doing that.

Just one new pottery fragment could be enough to confirm

that Jiigurru was once a hub for international trade.

We have to go very slowly and meticulously,

so that way we can locate any small bones or charcoal or artefacts.

And patience feels like a prerequisite for a job like this.

Absolutely. Lots of patience. But the rewards are so worthwhile.

But we're extra keen to see whether we can find pottery.

The team's breakthrough discovery's proving elusive,

and their time on the remote island is nearly up.

We're down nearly 50cm and that's taken nearly two weeks,

and we still haven't found pottery yet.

Every scrape of the trowel,

you hope a little piece of pottery will come out.

Maybe in the next day or two.

Yeah. Fingers crossed.

The expedition has just three days remaining.

I mean, we might find something.

Good luck.

Even today, much of Australia remains barely accessible,

and communication in remote regions is limited.

Yet thousands of years ago,

as many as 500 nations, speaking more than 200 languages,

had an incredibly effective way

of communicating over vast distances.

Long before the telegraph,

early colonists were astounded to see First Nations people

converging from every direction at the same time and place,

sometimes in their thousands.

Now, this feat of social organisation

was sometimes attributed to mental telepathy.

But of course, the truth is far from supernatural,

but no less remarkable.

It's a handheld communication device that stores, encodes,

and transmits information across hundreds of kilometres.

Today, we know this invention as message sticks.

At the Australian Museum in Sydney,

oral historian Dr Lorina Barker recently discovered

a piece of her own culture sitting in a glass cabinet.

When I saw the message stick, it spoke to me.

I could see our rivers. I could see our songlines.

It gives me goosebumps just to even think about the message stick.

Sent between tribes, clans and nations,

message sticks could be used to share news, arrange meetings

or conduct diplomacy.

It's amazing how much information really could be encoded

in these objects,

and their content is almost always about coordinating

the movements of people and the movements of resources

over large areas of country.

Dr Piers Kelly is the creator

of the Australian Message Stick Database.

He depends on First Nations people who can decode message sticks.

There's so much I don't know.

One of the things I'm hoping to find out is what these markings mean

that are depicted on the figures, and where they're travelling.

There's a lot of things that, due to the disruption,

we still are relearning.

And that's why elders are here with us today.

Elders and community are meeting to view this message stick

and potentially unlock secrets encoded in it

more than 130 years ago.

At the Australian Museum in Sydney,

a message stick created some 130 years ago

lies waiting to be deciphered.

Today, traditional owners and elders have come to decode its secrets.

You got the markings on him. That's a little fella. See he's a bit sad?

When you look at him, he looks a bit sad.

At the start of the full moon, pathway.

Across the rivers or...? Cross the rivers.

Along with community members,

senior elder Paul Gordon

is seeing this message stick for the first time.

The rivers are there.

The Bokhara, the Birrie and the Culgoa.

And then Cuttaburra.

The places that are depicted on these objects,

the body paint that's depicted on the figures

of some of these message sticks,

that's been really interesting for me.

Cuttaburra Creek. Yeah.

That's from going on ceremony from Goodooga

up to Tinanburra.

And on the other side?

On the other side, full moon.

So, corroboree time.

He's happy now, see? Look. Got that different face.

At the end of the trail. He's been through it.

Two young fellas that's gone through here.

You can see the emotion, you can see movement.

You can see how powerful he is. Look at how he's standing.

Standing strong, hey.

You can see they're not sad no more, eh, them two boys.

'Cause they're men now.

Within minutes, the elders identify this message stick

as a call to gather for a major ceremony.

Expertly encoded are the identities of both the sender and messenger.

The time it was sent - in this case, the new moon.

The route the messenger must take,

indicated by the spacing between rivers.

The identity of the recipient,

the time of the event - the next full moon -

and the location, the ceremonial grounds at Cudnappa Creek.

MAN: It's like a cultural map, you know -

you can see the journey across the rivers

that make up the eastern boundary of Muruwari country.

Seeing it for the first time

just brought it all back to life again.

Other people who spoke other languages

would still be able to recognise the symbols and know what they mean,

which was really important.

The message stick brought us all here to the Australian Museum

and brought us from different parts of the state to come down,

and it was calling to us to gather again

like our old people had done at the Cudnappa.

Ian! Talk to me. Hello. Good to see you again.

What have we found?

On Lizard Island, archaeologists working with traditional owners

are searching for evidence of an ancient international trade route,

and finally, their luck has changed.

We have found something on the erosion face,

just on the other side of the pit there.

So we'll just carefully walk past the pit,

make sure we don't disturb anything.

Tread carefully and lightly.

There it is, right there. Wow.

So, it's tiny.

But out of little objects come big stories.

So, that is a piece of pottery.

Wow.

How can you say with such conviction that it is from here?

Very easily, actually.

What we do is we analyse the minerals

that go into the pottery, and you compare that to local geologies.

What does this little, little fragment tell you?

It's thin and it doesn't have much of a curvature,

which tells me it's quite a sizeable pot.

And to get a sizeable pot made out of earthenware

that's only a few millimetres thick,

I mean, you've got to really know what you're doing.

I mean, this is made by an expert ceramicist.

This is the calling card of a particular idea.

This pottery shows that there were connections

going right up the coast and through into New Guinea

2,000 to 3,000 years ago.

They're sharing that knowledge of how to make pottery.

So literally, we're not only rewriting the history of Jiigurru

and Dingaal history,

but we're also rewriting the history of Australia at the same time.

So it's a big story.

The find adds to a growing body of evidence

that positions Jiigurru as part of an extensive trade network,

exchanging goods and ideas right across the Coral Sea.

Radiocarbon dating now places the pottery

at between 2,000 and 3,000 years old,

making this trade route as old as Asia's Silk Road.

My people were able to make this pottery

about 2,000 years ago,

and this pottery was a part of trading.

Today, the story of movement is being told scientifically,

as well as with the voices of our people.

I think we're gonna get a good sunset this afternoon.

You organise that?

I think the old people let that happen for all of us.

They looked out for us. They've looked out for us.

Highways like this one

are vitally important for trade and travel.

And the route they take is no accident.

They chart the most efficient course through some pretty complex terrain.

But for tens of thousands of years,

the First Australians face similar challenges,

crossing vast distances and some pretty unforgiving terrain.

A wrong turn could mean the difference

between life and death.

So how is this all possible before the age of GPS?

Across Australia, traditional goods have been found incredible distances

from their original locations.

Stone axes turning up hundreds of kilometres

from where they were quarried.

High-quality ochre mined in one place,

then moved all over the continent.

Even shell products from the coast found deep in the red centre.

How did all these items end up so far from home?

A powerful supercomputer has finally solved one of the great puzzles

of ancient Australia.

There's my ride.

For thousands of years, valuable goods have been moved vast distances

across the Australian continent.

The question is, how?

G'day, g'day! Hello, mate!

How you doing? I'm good.

What took you so long? (LAUGHS)

Archaeologist Professor Sean Ulm

has discovered that Australia's oldest trade routes

were far from random.

Instead, they were efficiently designed networks

reaching across the continent.

In the distant past, 30,000, 40,000 years ago,

the old people were trading goods hundreds and hundreds of kilometres.

Wow.

For example, pearl shell from the Kimberleys

was being traded all the way down to Adelaide.

Baler shell from the Gulf of Carpentaria

was coming down to the Flinders Ranges.

We know those goods were important,

connecting people over those huge distances,

even when the environment was much drier and harsher

than it is today.

Knowing how deliberately and strategically

our ancestors travelled

could tell us a lot about the past.

Archaeology only tells us what survived to the present,

and to really understand the continental-wide picture,

we need to turn to some pretty fancy computer modelling.

To identify the locations of these trade routes,

Sean enlisted the help of a military-grade supercomputer

to create the largest-ever simulation of human movement.

In our model, we simulated 125 billion different ways

to travel across the continent,

but not all of them are equally probable.

There's a whole lot of considerations

that people are calculating into their wayfinding

of what the best path is to traverse between point A and point B.

Efficient travel is more than just finding

the shortest distance.

To stay on course, the route needs visible landmarks.

A bit of a hill there.

Drinking water must be no more than 40 kilometres apart.

Well, that was a water crossing that went...

Went quite well. Went quite well.

And travellers must be able to overcome

the physical challenges of the terrain.

Sean's computer simulation modelled all these factors

over every square kilometre of Australia,

aiming to find the optimal route from any point on the continent

to any other.

So when we compared those pathways to the distribution

of those very old cultural places,

we saw really clear patterns emerging.

What the results told us was really astounding.

The simulation generated a tangled web

of thousands of less travelled paths...

..dominated by a handful of faster, safer and easier routes,

navigating around more difficult regions.

Ancient superhighways that allowed the efficient movement

of people and goods to the furthest reaches of the continent.

Once people were settled in country,

they developed massive trading systems

where goods were moved from one side of the continent

to the other.

I mean, these are extraordinary distances.

We're talking about sometimes thousands of kilometres,

and people develop that cultural knowledge over time.

Sean calls these routes Australia's ancient superhighways,

and they reveal a surprising discovery

about how all of us travel around the continent today.

Far from being a modern invention,

many of today's arterial roads closely follow routes

discovered by the ancestors

thousands of years ago.

These superhighways link hundreds of nations

from every corner of the continent.

No matter where you were, your stories, knowledge,

and well-being were all connected.

Throughout the series,

I've travelled the length and breadth of Australia.

Today, it's time to pay a visit home to the Tiwi Islands.

Hey! Hello! Hello!

Very excited to see me.

Many of these people welcoming me are my blood relatives.

Hello, Grandson!

But even people I have no biological connection to

are related to me via an intricate social system.

The kinship system.

Hello!

And this is my mob.

Later today, I'll be taking part in a demonstration of Tiwi culture

which will identify my roles, status and obligation in the community.

Kinship is at the very heart of Indigenous culture,

but it's something most non-Indigenous Australians

are yet to learn about.

So what you've just divided into is the two halves of the universe.

Now, in anthropological terms, they're called the moieties.

At Sydney University, Dr Lynette Riley educates people

about kinship systems.

For me, it's really about understanding the basics

of Aboriginal cultural interaction.

There are three levels of the kinship system -

moieties, totems and skin names.

The first level is moieties.

So, moieties is the foundation for how the kinship structure works.

This is the first level of relationship.

People of the same moiety,

which we inherit from our mothers or fathers,

are obliged to help each other.

Every single person here who has the same moiety as you,

these are all your brothers and sisters.

So this means this is also your first level of support.

Another important level of kinship is skin names.

Skin names gets down to the specifics

of who can marry whom,

so that we're mindful of what the genetic impact

of people whose bloodlines are too close

might mean in creating health problems for our children.

You're not allowed to marry anyone who has the same skin name.

So what they're doing is they're trying as best as possible

to control genetics.

So they're making sure that people whose bloodlines are really close

don't marry and have kids.

So, as Aboriginal people, we've been doing this for millennia.

Don't you think that there's some royalty out there

that should have adopted our way?

This system provides clear rules that help to keep gene pools healthy.

And now, for the first time, the genius and power of its design

has been proven mathematically.

Today, more than half the world's people live in cities.

In these massive populations, two strangers falling in love

are unlikely to be so closely related genetically

that they shouldn't marry.

But for most of human existence,

people around the world have lived in small groups of less than 100.

Marrying a blood relative

can result in generations of unhealthy children.

Here in Australia, our ancestors invented an ingenious system

to overcome the health hazards

of marrying someone too closely related.

The kinship system.

Gamilaraay woman Aunty Pat Field

is the mother of mathematical biologist Dr Jared Field.

I'm so proud of him.

He's the first Gamilaraay person that ever went to Oxford Uni

and he's never forgotten who he is, who is people is,

and where we come from.

Jared has used advanced mathematics

to analyse the Gamilaraay kinship system,

which he learnt as a child from his family.

Like, you guys remember all of these things, right?

Even though people were moved around, you still remember.

Yeah. Yeah.

This is what you need to learn, so you can teach your children,

you know, who they can and who they can't marry.

You know, when you talk to the old aunties and uncles,

they will always say, you know, why do we do this?

We do this so our children don't get sick.

Today, at the University of Technology in Sydney,

Jared is revealing his groundbreaking work

to fellow mathematician and Gamilaraay woman Karlie Noon.

As I'm sure many people know, when you're out there dating

and you meet a handsome blackfella

and, you know, you want to find out more about them

and there's chemistry there,

it's so important that, you know, you're not related.

With the Western family tree,

if you want to understand what's happening in that person's history,

there isn't enough paper in the world, right?

You have to go back as far as possible.

A conventional family tree

can trace the genealogy of an individual,

but its limits quickly become apparent

when compared with the Gamilaraay kinship system.

Inheritance, it's said, is such that if your mother is dark blood,

you are also dark blood.

So you have these cycles amongst blood types.

In Gamilaraay kinship, dark and light blood types

inherited from the mother are each broken down into two more subtypes.

For any individual, marriage is permitted

with just one of the four subtypes.

Marriage is such that you have to marry on the opposite blood type,

but opposite to your father.

Which subtype a person belongs to

is the only information needed to know who they can marry.

This works even without the need for a family tree.

But to demonstrate just how effectively

the system protects genetic health,

Jared needs to know the subtypes of all an individual's ancestors.

Which he can find by tracing the hereditary links.

So if you're type B, then this tells you

that you have a mother of type A, so moving to the left,

and father of type D.

If you go up one generation,

an A type individual will have a B mother and a C father.

So left and right.

And then a type D individual will have a C mother and a B father,

and so on and so forth.

You can populate the entire family tree of this B individual

just by knowing this map.

This allows Jared to calculate the probability

of having closely related ancestors.

His result reveals one important number.

The minimum size at which a population can safely reproduce.

In other parts of the world,

this number would typically be in the hundreds, if not greater.

So, to get as closely related on average as first cousins,

we would have to reduce to just 24 individuals,

which is remarkable, I think.

By following Gamilaraay kinship rules,

the risk of genetic diseases remains at a safe level for any population

over just 24 people.

The system is a really optimised system, right?

You know, these kinship systems

are absolutely some of the best systems that we've seen in humanity,

the history of humanity.

Gamilaraay, Tiwi and other First Nations kinship systems

reveal pure mathematical genius.

But the ingenuity of the kinship system doesn't end there.

For any society to survive,

it also has to manage its natural resources carefully.

In Australia, our kinship systems were designed to do exactly that.

Next, how the kinship system ensures natural resources are preserved

and shared sustainably.

In the story of human history,

there is no shortage of societies that have failed

because resources were overexploited.

Today, we're all too aware of ecosystem collapse

and the threat of extinction.

To preserve our natural resources,

First Nations people developed another level of kinship -

the totem system.

So, your totems also tell you

what your responsibility is to the environment,

to the world around you.

In the totem system,

each person has an individual animal or plant totem.

For example, the kangaroo.

So, kangaroo people, you've got to learn every single thing

about the kangaroo.

So you get to know it to such an extent,

you are kangaroo.

Eating kangaroo is not permitted.

Because that's like harming your brother or your sister,

because your job is to conserve.

And you must update the community

on the health of the local kangaroo population.

With your totem, you will not only be expected to do certain things,

you will be held accountable for what you don't do.

Every animal and plant,

from kangaroos to emus to eucalyptus trees,

is accounted for, ensuring sustainability.

Even rivers are included,

with individuals taking responsibility for each section.

Today, the totem system lives on.

Off the coast of Queensland at Jiigurru,

otherwise known as Lizard Island,

Ben Abbatangelo is joining traditional owner Kenneth McLean...

Wallamba. That's the name of that hill there.

..on an expedition to ceremonial ground

used to teach young hunters.

So, the closer I got to this rock formation,

the quicker it became obvious that it is sculptured in a turtle shape.

You kind of can see that you've got the front arm here

and the back arm here.

You've got the tail at the back, the head at the front,

and then obviously the bulge over the top to signify its shell.

Kenneth, can you describe the significance

of these stone arrangements?

So, for the young fellas coming out here,

seeing these stone arrangements, that's their responsibility

to protect our environment as well as the animals on this environment.

A hunter's role is to learn his responsibility of hunting

and looking after his environment.

So the stone arrangements on Jiigurru

represents the law, the ceremony, the songlines, also the environment.

Each of these stone arrangements

is shaped to represent a different totem.

For the younger ones in our community,

will give them a chance to connect their self to country,

learn about the law of the sea.

Today, archaeologists are using LiDAR

and photogrammetry scanning

to help preserve the stone formations.

Oh, wow. That is excellent.

So all of this is just happening

at the click of the fingers on the phone.

Yeah, it's one of the... one of the benefits

is we can do this fairly quickly and process it in the field,

and we'll be able to see what this stone arrangement

looks like in 3D.

It's a pretty amazing leap forward in recording these things.

Elder Uncle Lewis can no longer make the trek himself,

so these 3D models connect him to a ceremony

he went through as a young hunter.

Leaving them in their original forms,

the way our ancestors left them.

Share this for our younger ones.

It's their responsibility to look after our environment as well.

On the Tiwi Islands,

I'm preparing for a community gathering

incorporating elements of our own kinship ceremony.

Tonight, some of my mob are getting together

to show me some traditional Tiwi dances

that are usually reserved for ceremony.

Those dances reflect our totems and show our connections

to each other.

But before that happens, I need to get ready.

And that involves sourcing some ingredients directly from the earth.

Tonight, the community want to share select parts

of this important aspect of our kinship system.

I've never seen cliffs like this here.

This one go all the way up to the lighthouse.

I've come to my ancestral home, the Tiwi Islands,

to experience the dances of our own kinship ceremonies.

That's why I love this place.

I can see why, man. It's beautiful.

My grandfather, Teddy Portaminni,

is collecting ochre for my face paint.

This is the white.

Soft.

The natural pigment is ground down to make paint.

So this is the one you burn. Yeah.

Burn this, makes red.

Good red.

Relationships to another person or the totems you hold

can be communicated using bold colours or through dance -

something I hope my uncles Danny Munkara and Bernard Tipiloura

can explain.

Hello, Uncles! (ALL GREET ONE ANOTHER)

That's the one thing that I'm always confused about.

I never know what dance to do, you know?

So if you're for a funeral, for example,

it depends on my connection to that person.

Yeah.

My... What... The dances that I do.

Yeah.

Like, when I die, you have to dance...

(SPEAKS INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE)

For me.

And that dance is because the connection to you, for me,

is through my mother.

Yeah. That's why that dance.

Alright. You'll teach me how to do that tonight?

Yeah. That's good.

I'm being painted in my mother and grandfather's totem,

the horse.

Black stallion.

Even introduced species are given a place

in the kinship system.

Jungle fowl. Jungle fowl.

Each person here is painted with their individual totem.

Crocodile, yeah? Crocodile. Crocodile.

This way, everyone can see who is responsible for what.

My dance shows my relationship to Uncle Bernard,

which I'll one day dance at the Pukumani ceremony

to honour his passing.

More than just a ritual,

this ceremonial dance is part of my identity.

It's a big part of what has made Australia

a deeply connected continent.

These are the connections that tell us who we're related to,

who we do ceremony with,

who are the people we have the biggest responsibilities with

in looking after the environment.

I could feel the energy of the message stick.

Just touching something that our old people had made,

so that now we can receive that knowledge that they left for us

all those years ago.

Our ancestors invented sophisticated ways

of preserving a healthy gene pool.

JARED: This didn't arrive by accident.

It's the result of careful and considered thought.

And it's passed on through song, right?

So it requires poets to write the songs,

singers to sing the songs,

philosophers to think about these things.

Scientists to go through thinking about mathematics.

You need all of those people,

which is to say you need a complex society.

The sustainability of precious natural resources.

And a way of giving every person a place and identity.

So, for me to be reminded of these connections,

to know that I have a place where people rely on me,

and I can rely on them in turn,

whether I've met them or not, was so profoundly moving

and very important to me as a person.

So, yeah,

where you're from, it's much more than just a polite question.

But how can this understanding of connectedness

help us tackle the challenges of an uncertain world?

Are you ready there? Good.

Next time...

Make sure you follow this end here.

..an ancient innovation,

tackling one of the modern world's greatest problems.

Good fire management essentially halves the emissions from fire.

Knowledge of Australian plants.

How can you tell what you can't eat?

Helping to create new medicine.

It is a treasure trove for medical knowledge.

And was the boomerang the earliest invention of flight?

Now it's our turn to teach the scientists of the world.

Captions by Red Bee Media (c) SBS Australia 2023