Tasmanian Devils Lived Alongside Humans in Northwestern Australia as Far Back as 45,000 Years Ago, Researchers Find

The Tasmanian devil, Earth’s largest meat-eating marsupial, is named for the single island state it inhabits. But thousands of years ago, the species lived all over mainland Australia—including alongside cave-dwelling people of the Ice Age, according to new research. The Tasmanian devil’s mainland comeback Churchill and his colleagues recently unearthed telling fossils at Juukan Gorge in Australia’s northwestern region of Pilbara—the territory of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples.

Juukan has been called the setting of the “dawning of humanity”: It boasts rock shelters filled with evidence of human habitation stretching back 46,000 years, some of which were damaged or destroyed by mining operations in 2020. According to a study published in Archaeology in Oceania, the Juukan 2 rock shelter contained a jaw bone and a tooth fragment belonging to Tasmanian devils. Study co-authors Churchill and Gavin Ashburton of the PKKP Aboriginal Corporation, which supervised the excavation, write in the Conversation that the fossilized bone is a fragment of a lower jaw.

It retains two molars and is between 6,900 and 7,300 years old. The tooth fragment, meanwhile, belongs to a premolar, and it was found embedded in sediment between 42,500 and 47,100 years old. Tasmanian devils are scavengers.

Though they occasionally hunt for prey, such as wallabies and birds, devils mostly feed on carrion. The researchers concluded that the animals must have been using the Juukan caves—dwellings of semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers—as sources of food. The devils were the “local cleanup crew,” Churchill tells the Guardian.

They ate rotting meat, reducing disease risk: “Having a garbage compactor on four legs running around would have definitely been an advantage.” The researchers found other evidence that Tasmanian devils had been in Juukan 2. They write in the Conversation that they’ve cataloged and examined more than 8,000 animal bones at the site, 1,000 of which are marked from chewing and gnawing. Most of these bones were scratched by rodent teeth, but at least ten of them have gnaw marks consistent with Tasmanian devil teeth.

Those bones were found in deposits spanning the pre-Last Glacial Maximum—roughly 47,000 years ago—to the Holocene, about 11,600 years ago. Additionally, the researchers studied 263 digested bone fragments found in Juukan 2. They deemed some of them too big to have been eaten by Pilbara’s smaller carnivores, like quolls and mulgaras.