Tasmanian devils are among Australia's most distinctive mammals. Stocky, powerful and famously noisy, wild populations are now restricted to Tasmania.
Authors
- Timothy Churchill
Adjunct Associate Lecturer, School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences, UNSW
- Gavin Ashburton
Puutu Kunti Kurrama Traditional Owner, Indigenous Knowledge
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.
Why the Juukan rockshelter matters
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 .
A jaw, a tooth and thousands of scavenged bones
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. This tooth was excavated from sediment dated to between 42,500 and 47,100 years old.
Our findings are reinforced by a much larger body of evidence - the context archaeologists and palaeontologists use to interpret the past.
We have examined more than 8,000 catalogued animal bones from Juukan so far. More than 1,000 show chewing or gnawing marks from mainly rodents, but also quolls, devils and perhaps monitor lizards.
Upon analysing 55 of the bone specimens, we found at least ten with tooth-pit dimensions (or gnaw marks) closest to those produced by Tasmanian devils .
These devil-like marks occur in deposits from pre-Last Glacial Maximum (roughly 47,000 to 26,000 years ago), post-glacial (roughly 19,000 to 11,600 years ago) and Holocene (roughly 11,600 years ago to present day). This shows that devils repeatedly scavenged at Juukan across a substantial part of the sequence.
We also examined 263 digested bone fragments found in the rockshelter. These fragments are too big to be from the prey of Pilbara's smaller extant carnivores like quolls and mulgaras. They are most compatible with digestion by a large bone-eating dasyurid such as the Tasmanian devil.
Taken together, the fossils, tooth marks and digested bone show that devils were a recurrent part of the Juukan scavenger community over tens of thousands of years. They persisted through dramatic environmental change, demonstrating they were not restricted to the cooler or more temperate environments where they live today.
Devils, people and a changing scavenger community
Juukan also gives us a rare glimpse into the ecological relationship between people and devils.
Much of the medium- and large-animal bones at Juukan were brought into the shelter and butchered by people, while smaller animals were often gathered by owls and deposited as pellets. The devil-like chewing occurs on the larger material associated with humans.
This raises the possibility that human camps provided predictable scavenging opportunities for devils for tens of thousands of years.
The finds also complement devil-like rock art at Nganjarli in Murujuga , within the Dampier Archipelago National Heritage Place.
No comparable images are currently known from around Juukan itself. However, marine shell beads from the rockshelter indicate that people or objects moved between inland and coastal areas during the Holocene. Cultural knowledge of animals such as devils may likewise have circulated through these connections.
Importantly, there is no evidence that the two Juukan devil fossils themselves were butchered, cooked or eaten. Their presence may instead reflect animals entering and scavenging and eventually dying at the shelter.
The disappearing devil
Devils disappeared from mainland Australia about 3,200 years ago , after dingoes had arrived and spread across the continent.
Dingoes have long been implicated in devil extinction because they competed for prey and carcass scavenging. Our findings suggest another possibility: dingoes may also have displaced devils from scavenging around human camps.
If devils had exploited animal remains discarded by people for tens of thousands of years, the arrival of a new carnivore increasingly associated with humans could have reduced access to that reliable food source.
We can't yet demonstrate that dingoes caused devil extinction. But it identifies a previously underappreciated form of competition that may have contributed to their decline.
Juukan preserves far more than a list of vanished species. It records changing relationships between people, predators and prey over almost 47,000 years.
That is precisely why places such as Juukan are irreplaceable archives of Australia's cultural and environmental past.
Gavin Ashburton is employed by the PKKP Aboriginal Corporation, which oversees the archaeological excavation at Juukan.
Timothy Churchill does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
