Man stumbles across 49,000-year-old settlement while looking for toilet

A man on a toilet break in the Australian outback ended up stumbling upon the oldest-known evidence of Aboriginal settlement in existence.

Clifford Coulthard, an aboriginal elder, was surveying the territory with archaeologist Giles Hamm when he needed to go to the toilet.

“Nature called and Cliff walked up this creek bed into this gorge and found this amazing spring surrounded by rock art,” Mr Hamm told ABC news.

“A man getting out of the car to go to the toilet led to the discovery of one of the most important sites in Australian pre-history.”

Mr Hamm said the pair noticed a rock shelter with a blackened roof and knew immediately it was a sign of human activity.

Mr Coulthard came across the arid site, known as Warratyi, which showed Aboriginal Australians settled there 49,000 years ago, 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, The Independent reports.

Researchers who are now excavating the rock shelter in the Flinders Ranges have unearthed ancient artefacts 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.

Additional reporting - The Guardian