When humans first populated the Australian continent about 65,000 years ago, it was a lot bigger. People living in the Northern Territory would have been able to walk all the way to New Guinea.
Dr McCarthy is a maritime archaeologist with Flinders University. He reports:
"There's a huge area of archaeological landscape that's been lost to sea level change. The initial discoveries made in Murujuga were stone tools. They're very common — the sort of knives and forks of their day. They survive very well through sea-level change because they're made of igneous rock, which is very hard and durable."
One of the submerged sites Mr Churnside surveyed was an area that thousands of years ago would have been a freshwater spring. The spring is referenced in a Ngarluma cultural song his elders still sing today. "It's just like evidence and a connection to something they've talked about and sung about for such a long time," he said. "It's purpose and meaning; you get a sense of belonging to this whole landscape and the people that were here before."