Australian Aboriginal Geomythology: Eyewitness Accounts of Cosmic Impacts?

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether Aboriginal Australian oral traditions describing cosmic impacts are based on witnessed events and explores their potential to inform impact site discovery, despite lacking physical evidence linking them to known impacts.

Contribution

It critically examines the possibility that Aboriginal oral traditions encode eyewitness accounts of cosmic impacts and discusses their potential use in impact research.

Findings

Oral traditions contain detailed descriptions of cosmic impacts.

No current physical evidence links these traditions to known impact events.

Potential for oral traditions to guide impact site discovery.

Abstract

Descriptions of cosmic impacts and meteorite falls are found throughout Australian Aboriginal oral traditions. In some cases, these texts describe the impact event in detail, sometimes citing the location, suggesting that the events were witnessed. We explore whether cosmic impacts and meteorite falls may have been witnessed by Aboriginal Australians and incorporated into their oral traditions. We discuss the complications and bias in recording and analysing oral texts but suggest that these texts may be used both to locate new impact structures or meteorites and model observed impact events. We find that, while detailed Aboriginal descriptions of cosmic impacts are abundant in the literature, there is currently no physical evidence connecting these accounts to impact events currently known to Western science.