This might be the wrong subreddit for this article, OP.

I'm not familiar with anthropology as it's practiced in Australia, but most sources on world history/anthropology I've read date the earliest civilizations back to 15-20,000 BCE.

>Jim Bowler’s famous work at Lake Mungo in south-western New South Wales in the 1960s and 1970s pushed back the date of Aboriginal occupation even further – to an extraordinary 40,000 years. By the early 21st century, Aboriginal claims that they had always been here didn’t seem unreasonable alongside archaeological finds that measured their presence at 65,000 BCE.

Is this a joke? And then the article links to another article on said "remains" which says,

>While animal bones do not survive in the earliest levels of Madjedbebe, remarkably, plant remains do survive as a result of charring in ancient cooking hearths.

My main issue with the thesis of the book (as presented by the article writer) is as follows. Time, as most people understand it today, is not merely an experiential thing.* Conceptions of or the experience of time are not necessarily time itself. Current international time standards and metrics were imposed by Europeans onto the rest of the world, primarily for commercial reasons. Perhaps what the book might be for is a space for imagining or entering the mental space of Indigenous peoples, which is, to use a kind word, icky. The book is promoted as a break from the conception of "purity or wholeness before" of a colonized people but this angle fails by having Indigenous sources be interpreted through that same lens of being "out of time."

>And the question of whether (and how) Western historical narratives can populate deep history with actual lives, as well as understand and represent the thoughts, feeling and senses of people who lived thousands of years ago, is still to be answered.

While the process of making characters, settings and narratives is most commonly associated in the liberal arts tradition with the discipline of history, when describing civilizations/cultures/social practices on their own accord, studies become anthropological in nature. The archaeological findings described in the article should/would be bigger news if they were true and scientifically validated. Yet unclear what the book's author(s) are presenting the book as,** if the philological "evidence" or "substance" of the text is authentic, given the shakiness of the scientific evidence it is presented alongside. Again, if the book's contents are as the author describes, it seems as though while challenging a narrative of Indigenous Australianness as "atemporal," the author(s) fall into the same kind of conceptual "traps."

TLDR - A wonderful article that touches on issues in understanding the role of an oral tradition or philology in establishing historical study/review, but confusingly tries to establish the text and its findings in science and doesn't really describe any kind of true timeframe.

*Otherwise, what was the point of the scholars supposedly carbon-dating the remains?

**a cultural survey? or a textual sample? a documentation of languages/traditional narratives