THE past isn’t what it used to be. Take the question of which civilisation is the oldest of them all. The likely contenders are the Mesopotamian civilisation, the Indus Valley civilisation and Egypt. But this crown may actually belong to a very unlikely candidate.

Genetic testing has now proven that the Australian Aborigines have ancestries stretching back some 75,000 years, and that they settled in Australia a staggering 31,000 years ago — dominating the continent until the arrival of Europeans.

But when we think of civilisation, we picture cultivated fields and settled towns, kings and commandments — and the Aborigines had none of those. Or at least that’s what colonial historians declared.

But in 2003 a researcher discovered the remains of what she called “a gigantic aquaculture system” spanning 75-square kilometre (that’s over 9,000 football fields) built by the ancient Aborigines for the purpose of industrial eel farming. It was an artificial system of ponds linked with canals; channels connected to the sea to trap baby eels that would then be kept and raised — and they did all this 8,000 years ago.

The ancient world was a time of constant movement.

The eels were exported to other communities, mined ochre and stone flowed from the northwest and was traded for wood and other materials by means of a thriving trade system that crisscrossed the Australian continent, following routes laid out by using star maps, much like sailors use to navigate the seas. It was the Silk Road of the outback.

Given the low social status of the Australian Aborigines and the terrible discrimination they have suffered in the land they have inhabited for millennia, research into their history has remained a low priority. Given the latest evidence, who is to say what they achieved in the past, and what we may yet learn?

Theories that may have once banished their proponents to the abyss of crank historians are now also being taken more seriously.

Take Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyrdahl; he believed that ancient peoples could have made long sea voyages — something considered impossible at that time by most historians.

In 1947, Heyrdahl launched the Kon-Tiki expedition, sailing 8,000 kilometres from Peru to French Polynesia in a hand-built raft modelled after the ones traditionally used by the Polynesian people in an effort to prove that there had been contacts between the Polynesians and South American cultures.

While he made headlines his thesis was never widely accepted by academia, but now evidence has emerged that he was indeed on the right track.

Genetic testing indicates that there were contacts between the seafaring Polynesians and the Native Americans, and if that isn’t good enough, chicken bones excavated on a Chilean beach (chickens were unknown in the Americas prior to 1500 AD) provide more evidence. And then there’s the question of how sweet potatoes, first cultivated in the Andes, spread west to Polynesia. The most likely answer is through trade between the Polynesians and the Native Americans.

Heyrdahl later also sought to prove, based on a cryptic Egyptian record, that the ancient Egyptians could potentially have sailed from the west coast of Africa to the Americas, launching two expeditions using reed boats to prove his point and making it from Morocco to Barbados. His final naval expedition sought to prove that maritime trade existed between ancient Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley civilisation, something historians now believe did indeed occur.

We’re even finding we know less than we thought about relatively well-researched historical periods such as that of the Roman Empire. Only recently, Japanese archaeologists were shocked to find Roman coins dating from 300 to 400 AD in the ruins of an ancient Japanese castle. There certainly were contacts between China and the Roman Empire, but this discovery shows just how widespread links between ancient kingdoms were. Add to this the recent discovery of two Chinese skeletons dating from between the 2nd- and 4th-century AD in a Roman graveyard in what is now London, and we are forced to rethink what we know about the past.

Living in an age of hard borders and manufactured nationalism, it is easy to forget that the ancient world was a time of the constant movement and mixing of peoples and cultures and ideas. Much of this exchange has been deliberately forgotten or obscured thanks to the demands of the nationalism of later eras, but the evidence speaks for itself.

The Greek Historian Herodotus, writing about the multi-ethnic Persian army at the battle of Platea in 479 BC, mentions Indian soldiers wearing cloth spun from the “wool tree”, known to us as cotton. Thanks to Alexander, Greek influence spread so deep into India that many Ashokan edicts were issued with parallel Greek translations and Buddhists, alarmed by inroads made by Greek religion, began carving the first images of the Buddha in order to compete. As we build walls around ourselves, let’s bear in mind that isolation is not, and never was, the historical norm.

The writer is a journalist.

Twitter: @zarrarkhuhro

Published in Dawn October 3rd, 2016