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The oldest story at the end of time
Before doomscrolling there was wiki-rabbit-holing. You know, where you start with the Wikipedia page on Apollo 13 and somehow end up four hours later with thirty browser tabs, including one on the pre-Columbian history of the Dominican Republic. Ahh…there really were the good ol’ days… Anyway, I wanted to know what the oldest story ever told was and eventually ended up four hours later at Budj Bim (pronounced roughly like “Judge Jim”).
Now, when you toss geological facts, academics, skeptics, and colonial hot takes into the mix, you get quite the controversy. I’m not going to try to resolve that. What I am going to do is use this as an excuse to show you how error-correcting codes not only make the history more interesting, but also demonstrate that Budj Bim will remain the oldest story ever told until the end of time.
Budj Bim
In 1943, a workman digging near the volcanic crater of Tower Hill in southwestern Victoria, Australia, pulled a Wedge-shaped stone axe from beneath a thick layer of volcanic ash. For decades, the “Bushfield Axe” sat in storage as a piece of physical evidence that human beings had been chopping wood in the area since at least before the last volcanoes finished erupting. But nobody knew quite how long ago that was until 2020, when a team of geologists led by Erin Matchan at the University of Melbourne…
