Australia: Submerged land may have housed 500,000 people

Researchers from Griffith University in Brisbane have reconstructed the landscape of a vast area of land that now lies beneath the Indian Ocean off the northwest coast of Australia. The area, part of the North West Shelf, covered approximately 400 square kilometers.

Scientific findings suggest the region may have been home to between 50,000 and 500,000 people thousands of years ago. The ancient landscape featured an inland sea, deep canyons carved by rivers, and a massive freshwater lake spanning roughly 2,000 square kilometers.

Rising ocean levels eventually flooded the territory, forcing the resident communities to migrate toward the present-day Australian continent. The study provides new insights into how environmental shifts and sea-level changes impacted early human settlements.