Cylcons are among the earliest artefacts of the

Aboriginal Australians Aboriginal Australians are the various Indigenous peoples of the Mainland Australia, Australian mainland and many of its islands, such as Tasmania, Fraser Island, Hinchinbrook Island, the Tiwi Islands, and Groote Eylandt, but excluding the T ...

. A cylcon is a cylindrical stone tapering at one end and marked with incisions. The name is a shortening of the descriptive term "cylindro-conical stone".

Schøyen Collection __NOTOC__ The Schøyen Collection is one of the largest private manuscript collections in the world, mostly located in Oslo and London. Formed in the 20th century by Martin Schøyen, it comprises manuscripts of global provenance, spanning 5,000 y ...

MS 5087/36, Cylcon (Yurda), possibly with map of Darling River
commentary.

Matthew Flinders Captain (Royal Navy), Captain Matthew Flinders (16 March 1774 – 19 July 1814) was a British navigator and cartographer who led the first littoral zone, inshore circumnavigate, circumnavigation of mainland Australia, then called New Holland ...

saw two cylcons in 1802 and wrote up a description. Archaeologists have sometimes assigned cylcons an original ritual, magical, or religious function that over time was displaced by a more utilitarian one, that of a

pestle Mortar and pestle is a set of two simple tools used from the Stone Age to the present day to prepare ingredients or substances by crushing and grinding them into a fine paste or powder in the kitchen, laboratory, and pharmacy. The ''mortar'' ...

for use in food production.A. Kearney & J. J. Bradley, "Landscapes with Shadows of Once Living People: The Kundawira Challenge", in B. David, B. Barker, & I. J. McNiven (eds.), ''The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies'' (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006), pp. 182–203, at 186ff. It is impossible to date most cylcons, but the very heavy weathering of most attests to their great age. The earliest yet found in a dateable

archaeological context This page is a glossary of archaeology, the study of the human past from material remains. A B C D E F ...

is about 20,000 years old. They belong, with the earliest Aboriginal rock art, to the

Early Stone Age The Lower Paleolithic (or Lower Palaeolithic) is the earliest subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. It spans the time from around 3 million years ago when the first evidence for stone tool production and use by hominins appears in ...

. They are earlier than

tjurunga A Tjurunga, also spelt Churinga and Tjuringa, is an object considered to be of religious significance by Central Australian Aboriginal people of the Arrernte (Aranda, Arunta) groups. Tjurunga often had a wide and indeterminate native significan ...

s. If they were used to communicate messages, as generally thought, they are the oldest form of recorded

communication Communication (from la, communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is usually defined as the transmission of information. The term may also refer to the message communicated through such transmissions or the field of inqu ...

. Some are even thought to contain maps, which would be the oldest maps in existence.

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References

Further reading