A misshapen skull, which dates back 10,000-13,000 years ago, has been found near Swan Hill in Victoria, Australia.

The skull, belonging to a tall and solidly built Aboriginal man, has a misshapen cranium.

Also, his bones reveal he had multiple breaks in both forearms, a fractured ankle so severe his shinbones fused together and arthritis in his jaw.

“Death might have been something to look forward to for him,” The Age quoted palaeo-anthropologist Peter Brown as saying.

“You can only change the shape of the head in a baby because the skull is soft and malleable so it can pass through the birth canal,” said Professor Brown, from the University of New England.

“It is clear from the archaeological record that a group of people living on the Murray River used to do this … between 10,000 and 13, 000 years ago,” he added.

Brown added that massaging the brain doesn’t cause brain damage because it is a flexible organ.

Cranium manipulation was not an unusual practice – some reports suggest it was the most popular type of body modification after circumcision.

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A cave full of 15-million-year-old marsupial remains has been found in a cave in Australia.

The rare haul of fossils includes 26 skulls from an extinct, sheep-sized marsupial with giant claws.

The finds come from the Riversleigh World Heritage fossil field in north-west Queensland.

The beautifully-preserved remains have been described in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“It’s extraordinarily exciting for us,” said University of New South Wales palaeontologist Mike Archer, co-author of the research.

“It’s given us a window into the past of Australia that we simply didn’t even have a pigeonhole into before.

“It’s an extra insight into some of the strangest animals you could possibly imagine.”

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A rock painting dating back to the 1620s is the oldest picture of early contact found in Australia.

Archaeologist Paul Tacon says there are telling signs it is a depiction of a Perahu – a boat popular in Indonesia and Malaysia around the 17th century.

“One of the distinctive features is a tripod mast, another is a rectangular sail. And those are quite clear in this image,” he said.

He says beeswax pellets stuck to the painting have been dated back to the 1620s, making it the oldest dated picture of early contact in Australia.

He also says there is clear evidence Macassars from Indonesia were sailing to north Australia to fish for trepang in the 1700s.

The painting is forcing archaeologists to rethink when outsiders first arrived on Australian shores.

“This find is extremely significant because it is our oldest reliably dated contact rock art image,” Mr Tacon said.

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Home renovations have revealed one of only three sets of 19th-century murals known to exist in Australia. [Thx John!]

The mural was hidden for more than 100 years under seven layers of paint and three layers of wallpaper until Keith Sutton, the owner of the Victorian terrace it’s housed in, decided to renovate.

When he bought the dilapidated house in Petersham in 1997, he had no clue he was buying what is believed to be the only anti-Sudan War mural in Australia.

In 1999, when his friend Mike Mackay started stripping the paint and wallpaper from the living room walls, he was stunned to find a face.

”I didn’t believe him,” Mr Sutton said. ”I said ‘righto Mike, get off the ladder and have another beer’.”

The face was that of British General Charles Gordon, whose death during the fall of Khartoum is said to have prompted Australia to send its first troops to fight an overseas war, in 1885. Gordon’s was the first of 28 life-sized Indian ink and pencil images, many of them satirical and reflecting the politics of the day, including Ned Kelly, the premier and later prime minister George Reid, and governor Lord Augustus Loftus (holding a chicken, which referred to the eggs he used to sell to supplement his income). A copy of a Livingston Hopkins cartoon, published in The Bulletin on September 26, 1885, satirising the cost of the Sudan war was also uncovered.

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Ancient cave art which may depict a bird which went extinct 40,000 years ago may be the oldest cave art in Australia.

“The animal wasn’t an emu; it looked like the megafauna bird Genyornis, with thick, huge toes and short legs,” stated Mr Gunn.

“When we got to the beak we knew that was no emu. We thought, ‘goodness do we have a Genyornis?’,” said anthropologist and paleontologist Peter Murray, who is now retired from the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

Genyornis had a big beak that it used to eat fruits and probably smaller animals that were either too stupid or too slow to escape. Genyornis fossils reveal that it had large hoof-like claws on its toes, adapting it to a cursorial life.

“If it is a Genyornis — and it certainly does have all the features of one — it would be the oldest dated visual painting that we’ve got in Australia,” said Mr Gunn.

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