Talk:Gwion Gwion rock paintings

The "deer" paintings
I feel discusion of the "deer" Bradshaws should be included in a sub-section of the Controversy section. There has been sufficient controversy over what they depict and the repercussions regarding who painted them and when. Personally I dont see enough evidence supporting that they are costumed people. A favourable comparison with the corroboree ("giraffe") image is stringing too long a bow for me. I see them as possibly depictions of spirits. They may even have been ancestral memories handed down since Indigenous arrival as deer certainly existed on nearby islands they may have visited. Dating may clear this up (40-50K date would support this?) so what is happening in this area? Wayne (talk) 01:43, 1 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I brought this up on Ebbsey's talk page. He hasn't responded to my follow-up question regarding the age of Bradshaw paintings. - HappyWaldo (talk) 06:59, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

ENSO and change in rock art
Evidence of ENSO mega-drought triggered collapse of prehistory Aboriginal society in northwest Australia paper in GRL proposes that a mid-Holocene El Niño–Southern Oscillation forced collapse of the Australian summer monsoon and ensuing mega-drought spanning approximately 1500 yrs was the likely catalyst of the change in rock art from the fine featured anthropomorphic figures of the Gwion Gwion or Bradshaw paintings, to broad stroke Wandjina figures, following a hiatus of at least 1200 yrs. . . [note text copied by me from abstract without sufficient rewording for use in our article]. . . . . . . dave souza, talk 09:11, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I've had a go, using the abstract only, it would be useful to have this reviewed by someone with access to the full text. Richard Keatinge (talk) 09:57, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I have the full text. I can expand the mention but will need to check a few other sources it cites as some of the dating conflicts with this article. The source for this articles (most recent) dating for the Bradshaws is Rock Art Research 16 (2): 127-129 dated 1999, while the ENSO article (published 28 November 2012) uses dating from Watchman et al., 1997 and Morwood et al., 2010. The difference, though small, is significant in regards to how mention can be written. One interesting point is that the ENSO article neatly ties in with (and explains) the existance of Bradshaw style paintings to the east of the Kimberleys so I need to look at those as well. Wayne (talk) 05:26, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I expanded it by adding more detail and mentioning Veth's critique although I have problems with his reasoning in regards to linguistics. I still need to check out the Bradshaw style paintings to the east of the Kimberleys. Wayne (talk) 16:57, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Dating of Bradshaw variants through historical context.
Another point that could be investigated. The four variants represent a changing artistic style over time. The tassel and clothes peg Bradshaws use multibarbed spears while they are not present in Sash, or historically... because Kimberley Point spears superseded barbed spears? Thus, Tassell Bradshaws seem to be the earliest artistic style as Shaw posited. The discovery of an image of a thylacoleo carnifex with superimposed tassel and clothes peg figures implies a date of more than 46,000 years for the very earliest Kimberley art. Wayne (talk) 04:57, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I added a bit about the thylacoleo image (and added the image). Let me know what you think re neutrality. Wayne (talk) 16:51, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Edits by Steatornis
I am only a beginner with the rules for posting on Wikipedia, but I just found out about the talk page where the relative strengths of our arguments can be judged by a third party in the light of NPOV.

Here are some questions about your recent excisions from my attempted "Bradshaw Rock Painting" Wikipaedia entry.

1. Since it is not possible to find a more neutral statement than one from the nucleotides of DNA themselves, how can one justify your censoring of my statement about the hundreds of thousands of base pairs that have been transferred to the Australian Aboriginal population from the genomes of both Denisovans and Indians from the sub-Continent (Excision 1)?

As I said in the editorial note with this piece, the two reference papers are very strong, in top journals that would have received rigorous pier review, and they are incontrovertible, so there is no question of a comeback from another group in disagreement, as in the Kennewick man controversy.

I presume that your objection concerns the vexed issue of whether the Bradshaw culture and Aboriginal culture were continuous. At least, there is very strong bias in your editing that indicates that you lean strongly toward the possibility that there is/was continuity. This is a scientific question that is still open and may take a good while yet to settle to the satisfaction of everyone. In the meantime, an unwarranted assumption of a link has the danger that important details about the Bradshaw culture will be lost. This lesson comes from some of the 26 minority cultures in China who have avoided being swallowed up in the billions of surrounding Han Chinese by actively defining and maintaining cultural distinctions (see below).

In the case of the Bradshaw culture, who will be served if one minority swallows another?

The other possibility is that you may have objected to my linking these genetics to the continued attacks on the image of the late Grahame Walsh that were triggered by his conjecture about waves of human migration to Australia. I think that you have overreached yourself here. Even if I agreed with you about the treatment of Walsh (I don't), there is no justification for chucking out the obviously neutral genetics in addition to my reference to the unpopular, now justified, position of Walsh.

2. Why have you permitted the dog whistle term, "shamanism", to be retained in this post?

A quick read of the highly emotional offerings that use this term will show that "shamanism" means many things to many people and should be avoided by Wikipaedia, unless there is an accompanying brief that deals with the emotion surrounding the word and its many connotations.

a. Chaloumpka is an expert on the Aboriginal art of Eastern Arnhem Land and has a limited, idiosyncratic, view of Bradshaw Rock art. To put his opinion forward as a majority view is a travesty of NOPV. In addition, he may also be subject to the double error of assuming that what is true of Aboriginal rock art (i.e. no obvious use of trance in art) is also true of Bradshaw art. b.The most highly documented study of the influence of trance on rock art is by David Lewis-Williams, who had the benefit of being able to check his interpretations of the transformations in the art against reports of witnesses (Excision 2). c. Most workers in the field do not publish papers, instead relying on books that are not subject to the fierce reviews that are usual. This makes it more difficult to decide which views are consensus.

If you going to edit out well-documented studies like those of Lewis-Williams, why not remove the whole, biased paragraph on "shamanism"?

Overall Bias: There is a general problem with your editing, whose gestalt would take an essay to convey, but for which I can provide pointers. Your bias is probably unconscious, but it was quite shocking for me, working in the real world of Bradshaw rock art, even before I learned about Wikipaedia's aim for NPOV. Nature of the Bias: there is more than one hypothesis for the origins of the Bradshaw culture: Distinguishing between them is an unresolved scientific question, but your copy-editing consistently assumes only one hypothesis, that the Bradshaw culture is a part of Australian Aboriginal culture.

1. You completely ignore Walsh's monumental (2000) volume on Bradshaw art. This huge collection of figures and text contains more information than the total of all other work published so far on Bradshaw art! 2. In line with 1. You have joined the unjustified castigation of Walsh and refused to allow the genetic evidence for ancient human migrations to Australia of Denisovans and continental Indians that show that Walsh's conjecture was right (Excision 1).. While it has little to do with science, the personal attacks on Walsh, which have continued after his death, have not been mitigated by the subtle anti-Walsh bias of your copy-editing. 3. You gently mock references to the alternate hypotheses. 4. It is commonly assumed, perhaps by you too, that the Bradshaw-Aboriginal link is supported by a vocal, politically-correct majority that includes most Aboriginals, but this is not correct. In the North Kimberley, which has the greatest concentration of Bradshaw art, there are three Aboriginal language groups that believe that the separate Bradshaw culture needs to be protected, a task that would not be enhanced if it is subsumed into Aboriginal culture. The dangers of prematurely subsuming the Bradshaw culture are well-known to 26, other minority, cultures in China, still living, whose separate identifiable languages, customs and costumes have resisted absorption into the surrounding Han majority only because they recognise and emphasise their separate features. 5. It is a double error to subsume the two cultures and then assume that a feature absent in one (e.g. use of trance), will also be absent in the other. Your high-handed excision (Excision 2) of the material showing a role for trance in Williams relied heavily on Chaloupka’s polemic that makes this error.. 6. You continue to feature the poor science of Barry's study, and to edit out criticism of it (Excision 3). Barry completely failed to establish his claimed support for the Bradshaw-Aboriginal link because of 3 fatal defects in the research. the Bradshaw-Aboriginal-link because of 3 lethal defects;-a. No temporal analysis, so omitted early very complex Bradshaws; b. Failed to identify a number of identical icons in Africa and Australia; c. Wrongly assumed that computer algorithms are superior to humans in this kind of pattern recognition.

Excision 1:Compelling new evidence for Walsh’s conjecture about multiple waves of ancient human migration to Australia comes from modern genetics. In separate events, Denisovans and subcontinental Indians came to Australia and their DNA now makes up around 5% of the Australian Aboriginal genome. Denisovans: Indian Subcontinent:

Excision 2: It is a distortion to frame this aspect entirely in terms of ritual when it is nearly impossible to interpret motor actions, such as ritual, from the depictions of an extinct culture. Instead, more weight should be given to the significance of depicted visual images that might reflect the experience of trance, as set out in 5 volumes and numerous papers by Lewis-Williams. Apart from the considerable detail accumulated in this work, he was also able to check the interpretations of depictions against the accounts of witnesses because he was conversant in click-languages. This cross check is not available to us for Bradshaws, but the detailed correspondence between the various transformed images in San and Bradshaw rock art leave no doubt that we are studying the same phenomena of trance visualisation. Another contribution made by Lewis-Williams to the polemical literature on “shamanism” is to show the limitations of the common stereotype. When it is applied to the San, the trance is better described as “entheogenic”, or opening up to the cosmos, in a communal process that takes place without a shaman. This non-hierarchical trance experience has been shown to have many positive effects on the culture ). In contrast to treatments of shamanism in Western literature, which are largely pejorative, entheogenic trance may actually have facilitated the transition of Palaeolithic humans through catastrophic times.

Excision 3: Although cited in the controversy over the origins of the Bradshaw culture, Barry’s study has two fatal weaknesses:- 1. There was a failure of the computer-assisted method to identify a number of identical icons found in both Australian and African rock art. 2. There was a considerable over-estimate of the powers of computer algorithms to undertake pattern recognition when they are still inferior to humans. Steatornis (talk) 17:41, 13 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your work, and also for taking this to the talk page. I am keenly aware of the admonition to not bite newbies and I'll hope to leave you feeling that you are welcome and your hard work is appreciated. I have started by putting your comments in the customary order for a talk page - latest at the bottom.


 * You do need to be aware of the rather strict policy on no original research and its ramifications. At this diff I removed reference to two interesting papers, one describing Denisovan input to Australian / New Guinean genomes (not well dated but possibly around 40,000 BP), and one describing Indian input (better dated to about 1200 years ago). I read them with interest and as you point out they are perfectly good sources for what they do say, but they don't mention anything about Bradshaw rock art. In Wikipedia terms this is original research. In order to include this argument we would need sources that not only say things about Australian ancestry, but also link them to the people who produced the Bradshaws. These sources do nothing of the sort. The same goes for the comments, again interesting in themselves, about trances and rock art among San hunters, and about computerized pattern recognition. It is not enough for us to say that these things are relevant to the Bradshaws. We need reliable sources that say so. We are not here to construct arguments ourselves. We are here to present what other people have argued. In short, your sources simply have nothing to offer this article. The comments on shamanism, on the other hand, are made in the specific context of the debate around Bradshaw rock art, and so - whatever either of us may think of them - they should stay. I hope this helps and I do hope that you will continue to contribute to Wikipedia. Richard Keatinge (talk) 22:15, 13 May 2015 (UTC)


 * I can assure you that the current article has treated Walsh more kindly than the academic community does. Denisovan (5% of the Australian Aboriginal genome) and Indian (11% of the Australian Aboriginal genome) admixtures are irrelevant for this article as the data suggests that Aborigines and Denisovans interbred in Asia before the migration to Australia while the Indian contribution was around 4,000 years ago, long after the Bradshaws. As Richard Keatinge says, the research must refer to Bradshaw art or it fails no original research per synthesis and even if it does pass, then it must still follow WP:NPOV regarding due weight. The articles mention of Walsh gives him the weight accorded to him by the academic community. Don't let these criticisms put you off editing Wikipedia. It takes a while to understand the editing policies and even long time editors have trouble at times. Wayne (talk) 01:49, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

DNA evidence
Just putting this here as a source:
 * http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-29/explainer-who-were-the-first-australians/6576364 Explainer: Who were the first Australians? 702 ABC Sydney By John Donegan Posted 29 Jun 2015, 10:38am.
 * "Dr Michael Westaway, biological anthropologist from Griffith University, said genome sequencing dispels the myth that Indigenous Australians were not the first Australians."

Interesting! 220  of  Borg 06:35, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

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Unclear sentence
I don't understand this, it makes no sense to me:

"A 2020 study estimates that most of the anthropomorphic figures were created 12,000 years ago, based on analysis of painted-over wasps' nests. These aspects have been debated since the works were seen, and recorded, in 1891 by pastoralist Joseph Bradshaw, after whom they were named until recent decades."

How has Joseph Bradshaw debated the results of a 2020 study? Or: How does Bradshaw having seen them in the 1890s cast doubt on the results of the study? What is this supposed to be saying? 211.29.226.41 (talk) 22:06, 2 February 2023 (UTC)