“Fossils are the byproducts of complex landscape processes.
“The issues with the dating of Ngandong could only ever be resolved by an appreciation of the wider landscape,” says Kira Westaway, associate professor at Macquarie University and a joint-lead author on the paper. “Fossils are the byproducts of complex landscape processes. We were able to nail the age of the site because we constrained the fossils within the river deposit, the river terrace, the sequence of terraces, and the volcanically active landscape.”