".....Douglas, who is in his 90s, had only ever seen half of the terrain described in the songline and never the half with the watering holes. This suggests that the songline may have been created more than 7,000 years ago, when the sea level was far lower—and the area with the watering holes was dry and more than 100 kilometers inland. “Whether it was inland 100 kilometers or out 100 kilometers, we still lived here,” says Vince Adams, another member of the Murujuga Circle of Elders, which governs traditional cultural knowledge in Murujuga (called the Dampier Archipelago in English). “And we still got the story to tell you.”
The connection of the songline to a recent and remarkable archeological find by O’Leary and his colleagues illustrates how First Nations groups and modern scientists are learning to work together—in this case to find evidence of the ancient humans who lived on land that is now underwater, what the Murujuga Elders call “Sea Country.” Such evidence now includes stone tools that the scientists found last year on the ocean floor near the submerged watering holes.....