The Australian Outback is home to one special palm tree. The red palm, or cabbage palm, Livistona mariae, is found in Palm Valley growing around the Finke River in the central Northern Territory. It is here that a lush grove of over 3,000 palm trees form a cooling oasis among the rough rocks and gorges.
According to verbal tradition handed down for over 7,000 years, and possibly 15,000 years by the region’s Western Arrernte Aboriginal people, the seeds for the cabbage palm were brought to Palm Valley by “gods from the north.” But for years and years, the legend has been thought to be nothing more than a fanciful story.
The Northern territory government, in promoting Palm Valley, has gone along with scientific theory that says the palm trees are a relic left over from the Gondwanan Rainforests that once covered the most southerly of the supercontinents during the mid-Mesozoic era, way before Australia came into being.
DNA evidence backs up the Aboriginal legend
In 2015, a team of Australian and Japanese researchers, after doing an extensive genetic analysis of the seeds of the L. mariae in the Finke Gorge near Alice Springs in Central Australia, discovered the trees were the same species as another Livistona palm, L. rigida. L. rigida grows in two small pockets about 1,000 kilometers away along the Roper River and the Nicholson–Gregory River in Northern Australia.
Professor David Bowman is an environmental change biologist at the University of Tasmania. He and his colleagues were amazed to find out that his research coincided with Aboriginal folklore. “We’re talking about a verbal tradition which had been transmitted through generations possibly for over 7,000, possibly 30,000 years,” he told ABC News.
An earlier study was published on May 25, 2012 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. under the title: “Not an ancient relic: the endemic Livistona palms of arid central Australia could have been introduced by humans.”
At that time, the researchers proved that the Australian palms came from a Southeast Asian ancestor that was adapted to growing in dry, arid climates, and only became used to growing in rainforests at a later time. The conclusions reached in 2012 suggested the possibility of dispersal by humans but didn’t rule out animals as a vector.
The revelations in the new study reveal how additional research into the transcribed manuscripts of German anthropologist and missionary Carl Strehlow in 1894 aided in Bowman reaching his conclusions. In talking about his revelations, Bowman said, “The concordance of the findings of a scientific study and an ancient myth is a striking example of how traditional ecological knowledge can inform and enhance scientific research.”
“It suggests that Aboriginal oral traditions may have endured for up to 30,000 years, and lends further weight to the idea that some Aboriginal myths pertaining to gigantic animals may be authentic records of extinct megafauna.” The latest findings are published in the journal Nature under the title: “Outback palms: Aboriginal myth meets DNA analysis.”
