Australia's Aboriginal eel traps are older than Stonehenge and the pyramids.
The Budj Bim channels are at least 6,600 years old — roughly 1,600 years older than the first Stonehenge.
The events
- The Budj Bim eel trapsc. 4600 BC · Budj Bim, Victoria (Australia). The Gunditjmara people cut channels, weirs and ponds into the hardened lava flows of the Budj Bim volcano to trap and raise eels. The oldest parts of the system are at least 6,600 years old, making it one of the world's oldest aquaculture systems. Stone house foundations survive nearby; the landscape was listed by UNESCO in 2019.
- Building of Stonehengec. 3000 BC–2000 BC · Salisbury Plain. Neolithic Britons began a circular sanctuary on Salisbury Plain, raising its giant sarsen stones around 2500 BC. Aligned with the solstice sunrise and sunset, it is the most famous prehistoric monument in Europe.
More amazing facts
- 5500 BC · 1615 BC The oldest surviving cheese was found on mummies in the Taklamakan Desert and is about 3,600 years old. Cheese-making is older still: clay strainers with milk-fat residues from Poland date to about 5500 BC.
- 5050 BC · 2560 BC Chinchorro fishermen on the Chilean coast were mummifying their dead by about 5000 BC; their mummies predate Egypt's by some two thousand years.
- 4700 BC · 2670 BC Popcorn is about 6,700 years old. The earliest popping-corn cobs, from around 4700 BC, were found on the northern coast of Peru, two thousand years before Egypt's first pyramid.
- 4500 BC · 2560 BC The world's oldest gold treasure is nearly 2,000 years older than the Great Pyramid.
- 4100 BC · 2560 BC The oldest known winery is some 1,500 years older than the Great Pyramid.
- 3807 BC · 2560 BC A wooden causeway in England has been dated to the very year: 3807 or 3806 BC. Tree rings show the Sweet Track across a marsh was laid 1,250 years before the Great Pyramid, and was used for only about ten years.