A theory from the south

Start with the bird and the ball

The thread opens where this site's bird comparison does: the vulture and disc on Pillar 43. Beside it Fenton places a striped, upright figure from Arnhem Land with a rayed ball at its shoulder, and reverses the usual direction of the argument. The Australian painting, he says, came first.

The one on the left is older. There are two interesting stories: the meaning of that bird and ball and how that same sacred art appeared millennia later, thousands of miles away across the ocean.Fenton, 24 February 2025

The pillar detail is securely identified. The painting's site, style and date are not given in the thread, and the claim that it is older than 11,500 years rests on them; an image search in September 2026 did not find the painting. In September 2026 Fenton added a second reading of the pillar: the bird wears a V-neck top like Urfa Man's, so it is a bird-man, and a reader added that its knees bend forward like a person's. Both details are examined in Bird, or bird-man?

Buckets, totems and the sprouting yam

The three handled shapes across the top of Pillar 43, the handbags of so many comparisons, are for Fenton bark buckets, and the small animals beside them are clan totems. His witness is a drawing of a painted bark "bush bucket" and a passage of Kimberley lore printed beneath it.

Buckets and serpents portrayed on large rocks are a tradition that goes back much further than 12,000 years ago.Fenton, 24 February 2025

The passage tells how the ancestor Wúrulawúrula, "the mythical ancestor of the sprouting big yam", dug yams, hung his full bucket on a massive stone, lay down to rest, went into the ground and became an Ungud serpent. His picture and the filled bucket "remained behind on the rock in the usual form." In that one story Fenton finds the bucket, the rock picture and the serpent of Pillar 43 together, with the yam as the sacred thing they carry.

The thread does not name the book. The rivers, the spelling and the words Wóndjina and Ungud match Andreas Lommel's ethnography of the Unambal of the north-west Kimberley, published in 1952, some 800 km west of Arnhem Land, and a search inside its 1997 English edition finds "bush buckets" on one page. The bucket's ethnographic date is the twentieth century; its antiquity is the claim.

Marks on the body, marks on the stone

Churinga, or tjurunga, are the incised stone and wooden objects of Central Australia, kept from the uninitiated and engraved with arcs, bars and concentric circles. Fenton sets one beside a bracket-and-disc glyph on a Göbekli Tepe pillar, a relief with bracketed shapes, and a man whose painted chest carries the same design.

While these examples are not identical, it is obvious that we are dealing with symbols sharing a common root.Fenton, 24 February 2025

In its 2017 reply to an earlier version of this comparison, the excavation team observed that the Göbekli Tepe sign has two vertical arms which the Aboriginal sign lacks, and that a superficial likeness does not establish a link. The painted man is a printed portrait held by the Wellcome Collection, captioned "the wizard of the Worgaia, a great medicine man of Central Australia, as the signs on his body show"; its date and first publication are not recorded there. The pillar numbers and the churinga's collection are not identified in the thread.

The T

The T-shaped pillars are the most recognisable thing at Göbekli Tepe, and the central pairs in Enclosure D carry arms, hands and belts: they are figures, as the hands section discusses. Fenton's answer from the south is a montage of early photographs of men in tall ceremonial headdresses, a group with painted chest designs, and a rock painting of a long vertical form with a crossbar at the top.

Again we can turn to Northern Australia and find a wealth of linked symbolism including men with T head coverings and art depicting what look like T-shaped stone columns with human legs.Fenton, 24 February 2025

His caption adds "bullhorn-like symbols" and bull imagery at Göbekli Tepe and related sites. The 1920s publication is not named. The headdress photographs match the subjects and style of Spencer and Gillen's Arrernte ceremony photographs of the 1890s, which their later books reprinted; the exact plates have not been identified, and the rock painting's site has not been found. Whether the painted form is a column, a figure or something else is the question the picture poses.

Yinganna, mother and serpent

The theory's central figure is a woman who is also a snake. Fenton introduces Yinganna as "a creation spirit and mother goddess figure" who walked the land with her bark buckets, each holding a tribe of people with their animal totems and their lore, and who is "an alter-ego of the infamous rainbow serpent". He points to her head, "shaped like a sacred yam leaf".

In the Kunwinjku accounts of western Arnhem Land, Yingarna is the first mother, who carried the first people in her dilly bags and set them down in their countries; Ngalyod, the Rainbow Serpent of the wet season, is her child. The painting is the Yingarna figure on Injalak Hill beside Gunbalanya, identified here by comparison with published photographs: she is shown with fifteen striped dilly bags hanging from a headband, which is the "yam leaf" Fenton sees. A 2026 survey by Taçon, May, Jalandoni and Mungulda counts it among the region's recent Rainbow Serpent paintings, made after European contact. Taçon, Wilson and Chippindale's study of Arnhem Land rock art places the earliest Rainbow Serpent paintings some 6,000 to 4,000 years ago, in the time of the post-glacial floods.

The woman in the Lion Pillar Building

Göbekli Tepe has, in Fenton's words, "a glaring absence of female art", with one exception: a woman incised on a slab in the Lion Pillar Building, squatting with her legs apart and her genitals drawn large. He reads the posture as childbirth and the rounded head as a mushroom, then supplies the Australian key: Yinganna painted in the same posture, and the "mushroom" as a yam leaf.

We can see more of these yam leaves erupting from the back of a rainbow serpent painted in its chimaera form (note the two feathers on the head; it is a feathered serpent).Fenton, 24 February 2025

The excavators describe the incised woman as a later graffito on the slab rather than part of the original decoration. The Arnhem Land painting and the bark painting are not identified in the thread, and an image search did not find them. Plants growing from the Rainbow Serpent's back are a familiar feature of western Arnhem Land painting.

Snakes with mushroom heads

Snakes are the most frequent animal at Göbekli Tepe, in bundles on pillars, singly on sculptures and in the lower registers of Pillar 43. Many have broad, flattened heads. For Fenton this is the identifying mark.

That's because this is no ordinary snake; it is a rainbow serpent, and the head is again akin to what we have seen in art representing the serpentine mother goddess Yinganna. Note here that rainbow serpents are dual, with male and female forms.Fenton, 24 February 2025

The serpents section keeps the broad category "snake" apart from specific combinations. Which of the four carvings come from Göbekli Tepe rather than related sites is not stated in the thread. Viper heads are broad; whether the carvers meant a species, a spirit or both is open.

The Lore, the Emu and the flood

Having promised the meaning of the bird and ball, Fenton delivers a frame story, credited to Mark Jones "on the ground in Arnhem Land", which he dates "at around LGM (18,000 – 20,000 years bp)". Before then, he says, all humanity shared one story: Serpent, Tree, Spring, Seven Sisters and Three Brothers. The Emu, a man in the northern tradition and a woman in the southern, stole the sacred fruit. That theft is "when humanity went from the Original feminine Lore into the Law of Man".

Here in the Kimberley we began to paint people, lots of them. Indeed, it is all we painted for nigh on 7,000 years. During this time there were hardly any plants and animals painted, and there were NO serpents. Gods/deities were painted as people. This ends in war which lasts for around a 1000 years and then the flood which wipes out humanity.Fenton, 24 February 2025

Australia "was like an ark, isolated from the rest of the planet", and every later site is "an increment from the original story". Göbekli Tepe is the increment where "we left the animism of the bush and cultivated the grasses", threshed barley, brewed beer laced with ergot, and held its ceremonies "during the halloween period when we go through the Taurid belt". Farming, of animals and crops, was the breaking of a covenant with the earth and the end of the matrilineal mother goddess.

Part of this post fell between two screenshots and is missing from the transcript. The Kimberley's long phase of human figures, the Gwion paintings, has been dated to about 12,000 years ago by mud-wasp nests over and under the pigment. Göbekli Tepe's limestone troughs with oxalate residues, the basis of the beer claim, were published by the excavators in 2012; ergot is Fenton's inference.

A lost land and the people who sailed from it

How could Arnhem Land and Anatolia share a symbol set? The second thread answers with "a lost civilization and a LOT of lost land". The vanished culture was centred on neither region. It "encompassed all of Island Southeast Asia, a maritime culture that had already mastered sea travel 40,000 years ago", and "as with all naval cultures, its influence spread as far as its people could sail—globally."

Then, a series of catastrophes (likely a combination of comet impact and solar outbursts) initiated a profound climatic shift and a 130-metre sea level rise. […] The idyllic equatorial heartlands of their world, the Sunda plate, almost entirely vanished.Fenton, 25 February 2025

Its world, he adds, "was like Middle Earth": Denisovans, Neanderthals, Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis, perhaps Homo luzonensis and ghost populations, brought into contact by boats. He cites the finding that Papuan genomes carry Denisovan ancestry from at least three deeply divergent sources.

The seafaring evidence he cites is real and recent: microscopic traces of fibre working on stone tools from Mindoro, Timor-Leste and Indonesia up to 40,000 years old, with deep-sea fish bones and fishing gear. The sea did rise by roughly 120 to 130 metres after the glacial maximum, over some ten thousand years, and the Sunda shelf was drowned. The settlements, the catastrophe and the voyages are the theory's additions.

Ships to South America

Some Indigenous South Americans, notably the Suruí and Karitiana of Rondônia, carry a small genetic signal related to Australasians that is absent from North America. Fenton takes the missing northern trail as the decisive clue.

How could people from Oceania reach Brazil tens of thousands of years ago and not even pass through North America? In a ship, that's how—possibly bringing with them either Denisovan and Neanderthal crewmates or, more likely, being themselves hybrids.Fenton, 25 February 2025

The signal was reported by Skoglund and colleagues in 2015 and extended in 2021 by Castro e Silva and colleagues to the Pacific coast of Peru and central Brazil. Both papers explain it by an early founding population that entered through Beringia and moved down the Pacific coast; the ship is Fenton's replacement for that route. The graphic is a news article's text and maps, identified from its wording; the maps are the paper's own figures.

The faces on the Olmec heads

The colossal heads of the Gulf Coast have been called African for a century and a half. Fenton says they are neither African nor local.

Rather than African faces, these are representations of mariners from Oceania or their later descendants. As stone can't be directly dated, these giant heads are all dated to the layers in which they are found or cultures of the region - in reality, their actual age is unknown. I would suggest some may be well over 10,000 years old.Fenton, 25 February 2025

Citing Graham Hancock, he adds the bearded and "East Asian" faces of Mesoamerican art as the mixed crews of ships "plying the coasts of many regions", a reading that meets the bearded civilisers below.

The heads are dated by their excavated contexts to the centuries around 1200 to 900 BCE at San Lorenzo, later at La Venta. An age of ten millennia would require the sculptures to predate every dated Olmec deposit that contains them. All four heads in the montage appear to be from San Lorenzo, whose heads are placed between about 1200 and 900 BCE.

Feathers on the serpent

The last link runs north. Serpent Mound in Ohio has two projections behind its head, which Hancock's television series left unexplained. Fenton names them.

Well, I can tell you what these are - they are feathers. Any Australasian Aboriginal people watching must have been shouting at their television screens that day, as the rainbow Serpent is almost always depicted in their art as having these two feathers erupting from its neck.Fenton, 25 February 2025

From there the argument closes its circle. Mesoamerica's feathered serpent, whose lore places its origin "from over the ocean to the east", is "none other than the Rainbow Serpent, carried to prehistoric South America by Oceanian sailors" and brought up through Central America to Ohio. The mound itself he reads as the cosmic serpent swallowing the sun.

The serpents section treats the feathered serpent as a specific combination worth comparing feature by feature; this is a concrete proposal for one of its features. Serpent Mound's radiocarbon dates have been argued between about 300 BCE and 1070 CE. The survey plan in the montage resembles Squier and Davis's of 1848; the stone head and the two paintings were not identified by an image search.

Deep time: the Forgotten Exodus

Beneath the symbols lies the model Fenton has argued since 2017: that modern humans did not come out of Africa but went into it. When a 2023 genomic study inferred a severe population bottleneck around 900,000 years ago, he claimed the prediction.

Because my model argues that our ancestors were a small population that split away from Homo erectus in Southeast Asia, entering Oceania approx 900,000 years ago, this would appear identical to a population collapse and bottleneck event! A series of profound genomic changes gave rise to the ancestor of ALL large-brained human species in Oceania around 800,000 years ago.Fenton, 26 February 2025

Hu and colleagues inferred about 1,280 breeding individuals over roughly 117,000 years, between about 930,000 and 813,000 years ago, from the genomes of living people. The study does not place the surviving population anywhere. The oldest accepted evidence for people in Sahul is about 65,000 years old, at Madjedbebe in Arnhem Land.