Establishing when anatomically modern humans first arrived on the shores of Sahul has been a quest for a ‘Holy Grail’ since the early 1960s when Australian prehistory was first taught in Australian universities. Whist claims and inferences have been made for dates of up to 120,000 years the early dates mainly cluster between about 40,000 and 50,000 years ago.

In 1973, I originally test excavated Madjedbebe rock shelter (at that time named Malakunanja II). Fine charcoal particles in the sand sheet beneath the midden provided a radiocarbon determination of about 18,000 BP. Subsequently, the shelter has been further excavated three times. Most recently an age of at least 65,000 years has been proposed. This claim represents an outlier date for human arrival as much as 15,000 years earlier than the main cluster of the early dates for Australian sites.

The claim for Madjedbebe is now widely accepted as a given truth by the Australian public. Two challenges to the claim by teams of researchers representing the disciplines of archaeology, chronometric dating, geomorphology, and entomology have largely been ignored by the media.

The dispersal of single-grain OSL age determinations in the sand layer is consistent with termite bioturbation. Also, the human osseous interments in the excavated from the Holocene midden layer represent a relatively large number of interments at the site. The density of these interments is greater than at any other excavated rock shelter in Australia. It is possible that at least some stone artefacts at considerable depth in the sand layer may be Holocene in age.

The inference of human presence about 120,000 years for a shelly sediment at Port Ritchie on the Victorian coast is also questionable. The ‘Holy Grail’ quest to reliably demonstrate the arrival of anatomically modern humans in Sahul is not at an end. We may well have to take a step back.