People are living at Madjedbebe, a sandstone rock shelter on Mirarr country, surrounded by what will eventually become known as the World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park.
They’ll develop an impressive and innovative toolkit.
It’ll include complex stone axes, long before they are being made anywhere else in the world.
The axes take hours to shape by flaking small pieces of stone away and then grinding the roughly shaped axe down to a sharp polished edge.
They are attached to handles using fibre and resin, which is like a glue.
They’re used for cutting down bark and wood from trees, as well as shaping wooden tools.
But they have other uses, including extracting ‘sugarbag’, or native bee honey, from trees.
Along with the rest of their innovative tool kit, made up of knives, scrapers, sharp flakes and grinding stones, they become masters of processing plant and animal foods and medicines from the environment around them.
The people who live at Madjedbebe are also skilled artists.
Grinding ochre mixed with ‘binders’ such as animal fat or plant sap, they develop paints that allow them to create a visually striking gallery in the rock shelter.