This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Tasmanian devils are among Australia's most distinctive mammals. Stocky, powerful and famously noisy, wild populations are now restricted to Tasmania.
But this was not always the case. In fact, thousands of years ago, devils could be found across mainland Australia. Skeletal remains of Tasmanian devils have been found in deposits from southern Australia to the tropical north, across the Nullarbor, central Australia, Queensland, the Northern Territory and parts of southern Western Australia.
Yet one major region was missing from this record: Western Australia's Pilbara region. Our new study, published in Archaeology in Oceania, reports the first unequivocal evidence of Tasmanian devils from the Pilbara, recovered from the Juukan 2 rockshelter on Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura Country. Juukan 2 was a large rockshelter in the western Hamersley Plateau.
Archaeological research has shown people used the shelter from at least 47,000 years ago, including through the dry Last Glacial Maximum (roughly 29,000 to 19,000 years ago). The shelter is the only known mainland northern Australian Pleistocene-aged archaeological site where faunal remains occur in unequivocal association with stone tools. Its deposits preserve an unusually detailed record of people, animals and environmental change.
That record became internationally significant after Juukan 2 was extensively damaged by mining blasting in 2020. Research and rehabilitation have since continued under the direction of Traditional Owners. The strongest evidence for devils at Juukan comes from two fossils.
The younger fossil is part of a lower jaw preserving the first two molars. Dating of the sediment around the bone shows it is between 6,900 and 7,300 years old. The older specimen is a fragment of a lower first or second premolar.
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