Deeply etched into a cliff face in GunaiKurnai Country, near the township of Buchan in East Gippsland in rural Victoria, is a large limestone cave that hosts an extraordinary story.

Today, the area outside Cloggs Cave is mainly grassland and open woodland, with eucalypt forests further behind the cave. But this was not always so.

The environment changed as the last ice age came and went, and as the Old GunaiKurnai Ancestors managed Country through cultural burning and daily activities on the land. Photographs from the 19th century, as well as regional pollen records, show that during the early colonial times of the mid- and late 1800s, sheoaks were more abundant.

Early colonists cleared nearly all those that then stood near Cloggs Cave. But it is their grassy understorey that is of greatest interest to this story, which we can now tell.

In a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, we report the discovery of thousands of microscopic plant remains known as phytoliths that are testimony to GunaiKurnai rituals repeatedly performed over the past 25,000 years.

Who carried the plants inside?

Phytoliths are microscopic silica bodies that occur in plant tissues, their shapes and sizes varying in different parts of plants and between plant taxa.

Unlike pollen, which is dispersed by wind or insects, the hard, glassy phytoliths mostly get left behind........

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