Bone Cave
Gary Vines
Has anyone ever ventured to Bone Cave on Toolern Creek upstream of Melton?
"BONE CAVE. MOUNT MACEDON." The Australian News for Home Readers (Vic. : 1864 - 1867) 25 May 1864: 12. Web. 4 Jan 2017 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article63170377>.
Geological Survey of Victoria & Aplin, C. D. H. (C. D'Oyley H.) & Shepherd, R., 1825-1885 & Ross, J. L. (John Lidgate) & Wilkinson, J et al. (1862). Geological Survey of Victoria. No. 7 : N.W., [County of Bourke]. Engraved and published ... at the Geological Survey Office, Melbourne http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/26865752
Geological Survey of Victoria & Taylor, Norman & Aplin, C. D. H & Wilkinson, J & Gilks, Edward & Brown, J. D & Ross, J. L & Selwyn, Alfred R. C & Shepherd, R. (1862). Geological Survey of Victoria Retrieved January 4, 2017, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-235070141
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Richard Wright
I had never heard of it, let alone ventured to it.
The cave could be a taphonomically important site, given its proximity to the megafaunal site of Lancefield.
One of the problems that bedevils the direct dating of megafaunal bones from Lancefield is the absence of collagen for radiocarbon dating.
I see on TROVE there is a contemporary newspaper account of the bones in the deposit. Megafauna is not reported, but the Tasmanian Devil is.
http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/63170377/6162833
Rather depressingly, however, the report states the bones from the cave "are all strongly adherent to the tongue, and have quite lost their animal matter."
Nevertheless, the so called 'tongue test' does not rule out a residuum of dateable collagen.
Richard
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Michael Lever
I feel much exonerated for my instinctive use of the 'mouthometer'.
Where do practitioners draw the line though?
I recall working with an extremely competent individual who I shan't name, who made a practice of licking their range / scale poles clean for photographs. And was known to have a nibble of soil here and there to determine composition.
But I think that's an outlier.
Jillian Garvey
Dear Gary,
While I have heard of Bone Cave north of Melbourne I have never been to it. I suspect that much of the bone material is housed within the Museum Victoria palaeontological collections. While not much has been published on the cave it is the type locality of Potorous tridactylus tridactylus (Long-nosed potoroo).
This paper was published in 1964 but it focus on the taxa rather than the site:
Mahoney, J.A. 1964. The taxonomic status of Dasyurus affinis McCoy [1865] (Dasyuridae) and Hypsiprymnus trisulcatus McCoy [1865] (Macropodidae), two marsupials from a Holocene cave deposit near Gisborne, Victoria. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 77:525-533.
Jillian
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Richard Wright
caution to all those who seek to revive the ancient art of bone licking.
Don't do it on any bone destined for DNA extraction.
Diprotodon could be interpreted as sharing a human ancestry. In the
forensic field you could end up identified as being among suspected
murder victims.
Richard
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Jeannette Hope
It doesn’t ring a bell, but the most likely place to find a modern reference is in Norman Wakefield’s publications. He wrote on the fossils from a number of lava caves in western Victoria. I have copies of his articles but can’t check now because I’m getting organised for a trip to Melbourne first thing tomorrow morning.
The map states the cave is in ‘Pliocene Tertiary Basalt’ which suggests that it was originally a lava tunnel. The plan however isn’t a straight tunnel, and the fauna seems to be mid-late Holocene. It’s possible that the cave was part of an old lava tunnel that had collapsed in places and had only been breached to the outside at this spot when the creek cut down to its level, perhaps quite recently (ie Holocene).
As for the fauna, well, it was 1864, and the various ‘new species’ then will have been subsumed into the current understanding. The number of carnivores is interesting, but the article doesn’t give any clue as to absolute numbers/ proportions of species; though it doesn’t seem that there were any large species, larger than wallaby and dingo. Guessing, around 4000 years? But the dingo and devil weren’t necessarily contemporaneous in the site.
Cheers
Jeannette
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Jillian Garvey
Dear Gary,
I quick search online found this further references:
Gill, E.D. (1964). The age and origin of the Gisborne Cave. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 77: 532–533 (which is an appendix at end of the Mahoney 1964 paper).
D. Frankel, 1984. Excavations at Gisborne Bone Cave, Victoria. The Artefact 8.3-4:37–40.
I can’t find a copy online of David Frankel’s 1984 paper. If you (or anyone else does) I would love a copy.
Cheers
Jillian