The Cloggs Cave Sticks: 12,000-Year-Old Ritual Artifacts in Australia

Deep within the limestone foothills of the Australian Alps, in a quiet corner of East Gippsland, Victoria, lies a cathedral of stone known as Cloggs Cave. For millennia, its cool, dry interior has been a silent witness to the passage of time, sheltering the secrets of the Gunaikurnai people. In 2020, this silence was broken not by the clamor of treasure hunters, but by the careful trowels of a unique partnership between archaeologists and the traditional custodians of the land.

What they found buried in the cave floor was unassuming at first glance: two small, slightly burnt wooden sticks.

In almost any other context, these fragments of wood might have been dismissed as kindling left behind by a long-forgotten camper. But scientific analysis would soon reveal them to be something far more profound. Radiocarbon dating placed them at 11,000 and 12,000 years old—the end of the last Ice Age. Chemical analysis revealed they had been deliberately smeared with animal or human fat. And, most miraculously, they matched—almost exactly—a specific ritual recorded by ethnographers in the 19th century, a practice that had been passed down through oral tradition for over 500 generations.

These are the Cloggs Cave sticks. They are the oldest known wooden artifacts in Australia, and they represent what may be the oldest culturally transmitted ritual in the world.

Part I: The Discovery

A Partnership of Respect

The story of the Cloggs Cave sticks does not begin with the excavation, but with a change in how archaeology is practiced in Australia. For decades, Indigenous sites were often excavated without the permission or involvement of Traditional Owners. Cloggs Cave itself had been excavated in the 1970s by Josephine Flood, a pioneering archaeologist who found evidence of megafauna and ancient habitation but did not have the benefit of today's collaborative frameworks.

In 2019, the Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation (GLaWAC) invited a team led by Professor Bruno David of Monash University to revisit the cave. This time, the excavation was driven by the questions the Gunaikurnai wanted answered. They wanted to know the story of their Old Ancestors on their own terms.

Leading the cultural side of the project was Gunaikurnai Elder Uncle Russell Mullett. His goal was to reclaim the history that had been fragmented by colonization. "It's a unique opportunity to be able to read the memoirs of our Ancestors and share that with our community," he later noted.

The Miniature Hearths

The excavation team focused on a small area of the cave floor, carefully peeling back layers of sediment. As they descended through the dirt, they traveled back through time: past the 19th-century colonial era, past the era of the Pyramids, past the dawn of agriculture in the Middle East.

At a depth corresponding to the terminal Pleistocene—the volatile transition period when the last Ice Age was ending—they uncovered two peculiar features. They were small patches of ash, miniature fireplaces no larger than the palm of a hand. These were not the large, roaring hearths used for cooking meals or heating a family group. They were tiny, contained, and purposeful.

Protruding from the center of each ash patch was a single piece of wood.

The wood was preserved in a condition that stunned the researchers. Wood is organic; it rots, is eaten by termites, or disintegrates into humus. For a stick to survive 12,000 years requires a perfect storm of preservation conditions. Cloggs Cave provided exactly that: a dry, slightly alkaline environment protected from wind and direct sunlight, where the soil chemistry halted the natural decay processes.

Part II: The Science of the Sticks

The artifacts were carefully removed and subjected to a battery of high-tech analyses. To understand their significance, the team needed to know three things: what they were made of, how old they were, and what had been done to them.

2. The Dating: 12,000 Years Deep

Radiocarbon dating of the sticks and the charcoal from the miniature fireplaces yielded a date range of 11,000 to 12,000 years Before Present (BP).

To put this in perspective:

• This is 6,000 years older than the first writing in Mesopotamia.
• It predates the construction of Stonehenge by roughly 7,000 years.
• At this time, the sea levels were rising, eventually separating Tasmania from mainland Australia. The environment was shifting from a cold, arid glacial landscape to a warmer, wetter one.

3. The Residue: A Chemical Fingerprint

The most revealing analysis came from the study of lipids—fats and oils trapped in the wood fibers. Using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, scientists extracted residues from the sticks. They found high concentrations of fatty acids, specifically palmitic and stearic acids.

The profile of these lipids confirmed they were mammalian fat. While the science could not distinguish between human fat and the fat of a marsupial like a kangaroo or wallaby, the presence of the fat was undeniable. It wasn't accidental; the sticks had been deliberately smeared.

In this case, however, they did know. They had the key to unlock the code.

Part III: The Rosetta Stone of Gunaikurnai Ritual

The "key" lay in the dusty archives of the 19th century. Alfred Howitt was a government geologist and anthropologist who worked in Victoria in the late 1800s. Unlike many of his contemporaries who viewed Indigenous culture with disdain, Howitt was deeply interested in the customs of the First Nations people. He spent years earning the trust of the Gunaikurnai Elders of that time.

Crucially, Howitt noted that the stick was then smeared with human or kangaroo fat.

A Match Across Millennia

The correspondence between the 1887 description and the 12,000-year-old discovery was chilling in its precision:

The archaeologists realized they weren't just looking at old sticks. They were looking at the physical evidence of a specific cultural practice that had remained virtually unchanged for 12,000 years.

This represents a continuity of 500 generations.

Part IV: The Significance of "Country"

For Uncle Russell Mullett and the Gunaikurnai community, this discovery is a powerful validation of what they have always known: that their connection to Country is deep, ancient, and unbroken.

"The ritual is no longer practiced today," the researchers noted, as the disruption caused by European colonization in the 1800s severed many of these specific lines of knowledge. However, the discovery acts as a form of cultural restoration. It returns a lost chapter of history to the living descendants.

"They’re telling us a story," Uncle Russell said of the artifacts. "They’ve been waiting here all this time for us to learn from them."

Part V: Rewriting History

The Cloggs Cave sticks challenge several persistent myths about hunter-gatherer societies and "pre-history."

There is a tendency to view ancient nomadic peoples as living hand-to-mouth, with cultures that were fluid and constantly changing due to the lack of written records. This discovery proves that oral cultures possess a mechanism for information transmission that is as rigorous and durable as any stone tablet. To keep a ritual recipe intact for 12,000 years requires a highly structured educational system and a deep reverence for tradition.

Australian history is often taught beginning with the arrival of Captain Cook in 1770. The Cloggs Cave finding anchors the Gunaikurnai in a timeframe that dwarfs the history of the British Empire. When the ancestors of the British were just beginning to resettle the British Isles after the retreat of the ice sheets, the Gunaikurnai were already performing sophisticated rituals in East Gippsland.

Archaeology is often called the "study of stones and bones" because those are the materials that survive. This creates a survivor bias; we assume ancient people used mostly stone tools because that is what we find. The Cloggs Cave sticks remind us that the ancient world was likely built of wood—wooden tools, wooden shelters, wooden ritual objects—that have simply rotted away. These sticks offer a rare glimpse into the organic richness of Pleistocene life.

Conclusion: A Time Capsule Opened

The Cloggs Cave sticks are more than just archaeological finds; they are a testament to the resilience of the human mind and the enduring power of culture.