Science is Fun Fridays!
Boab trees grow large and live long. The oldest in Australia is about 1500.
So it's no surprise that dendroglyphs have been found in the Tanami Desert, belonging to the Jaru people.
Brenda Garstone is Jaru, and she teamed up with archaeologists to find and document these carvings. So far, they have found 12.
The above is a snake, as were most of the findings, but others were of emu and kangaroo tracks. The team also spotted grinding stones and tools around the trees.
Boabs disintegrate after death, which leaves little behind. Preservation and documentation is all the more important in order to maintain these ancestral connections to the land.
There is mention of how these carvings link to "King Brown Snake Dreaming." I found two Indigenous renderings.
From 1986, Billy Japaljarri Hogan
From 2009, Darryl Bellotti
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