Jonathan Swift [1667-1745] in his book, “Gulliver’s Travels” [1726], described Australia long before the voyage of Captain James Cook RN [1770], with information which could only have come from ancient Chinese writings on the mysterious southern continent. He also described a primitive hairy race that inhabited that land as the Yahoos.

Jonathan Swift
Photo courtesy of the British Information Service, London UK.

The Yowie Mystery - Living Fossils from the Dreamtime.

Copyright © 2007 by Rex Gilroy
All rights reserved
First Edition

Rex and Heather Gilroy are recognised internationally as Australia’s foremost relict hominid researchers. This book celebrates Rex Gilroy’s 50 years as the ‘father’ of Yowie research. Rex and Heather are also recognised internationally as one of the world’s foremost husband and wife research teams in the field of ‘Unexplained’ mysteries.

These daring and outspoken researchers are no friends of the Australian hard-core, narrow-minded scientific establishment, who would prefer that books of the kind produced by the Gilroys were prevented from publication.

When not carrying out field work, Rex and his wife Heather [a Registered Nurse/Midwife by profession] are at home writing books, surrounded by their huge reference library of books on all manner of scientific subjects. Besides their many and varied researches, Rex and Heather Gilroy are also involved in community service work as members of the Rotary Club of Katoomba.

Dead Horse Gap, near Thredbo. This wild region of the Snowy Mountains has been a “hairy man” locale since the first years of 19th century settlement hereabouts.

During June 1999 a stockman was riding his horse through wild scrub overlooking the road near where this photo was taken, when he spotted a number of “huge man-like footprints” in a mud patch.

Dead Horse Gap
Photo copyright © Rex Gilroy 2007

Excerpts from - "The Yowie Mystery" - Living Fossils from the Dreamtime.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
TROUBLESOME TOOLS

The discovery of the 7 million year old Pliocene ancestral hominid skull endocasts at Bega, New South Wales, not only presents us with the prospect of a far greater antiquity of Man in Australia, but also together with the 17 million year old Miocene slate fossils also previously described, hint at the possibility that a race of tree-dwelling primates could have entered this continent [unless there had been a separate Primate evolution in Australia?], abandoning their arboreal existence to adopt a terrestrial lifestyle well before this event tool place in Africa.

These first ancestral hominids looked far different to later forms, such as Homo erectus, for they would have still retained an ape-like appearance. Yet once they left the trees to forage on the ground their lifestyle changed dramatically, as palaeoanthropological evidence gathered from African sites alone well demonstrates. The change from a probable originally herbivorous, to an omnivorous diet came from the bipedal stance.

Our earliest [Australian] hominids could not have evolved their hunting activities without employing the crudest of weapons and this development finally separated our ancestral hominids from their tree-dwelling past, setting them off on the long road that has led to ourselves. The first weapons would have been stones, such as water-smoothed pebbles of a size heavy enough to inflict injury or death upon prey. Naturally, flaked sharp-edged stones would have been
employed to cut up the ‘kill’, until these primitive beings gradually discovered how to obtain sharpened flakes through smashing large stones against a hard stone surface or smashing two together.

They would also have used sticks and broken bones for digging purposes in their search for yams etc. These activities are said to date back at least 2,500,000 years in Africa, although the late Dr Louis S.B. Leakey, working in Kenya in mid-1968, unearthed evidence that a “bone smashing African ancestor of man” used a crude kind of stone hammer at least 12 million years ago.

The presence of ancestral hominids in Australia by around 7 million years ago [and earlier, as suggested by the Mt Victoria, New South Wales, Miocene slate fossils], implies the use of crude tools, either of naturally formed, or else deliberately manufactured sharp flakes. We believe that such tools exist in Australia, as yet unknown, and which in any case would go unrecognised by a scientific establishment which continues to look to Africa for our human beginnings.

This is the purpose of this chapter, for we intend to show that, not only do primitive ‘eoliths’ [ie Dawn Tools] exist here, but that archaic tools manufactured by Homo erectus, further demonstrate a pre-Aboriginal Stone-Age history for Australia, and that Homo erectus, the Yowie, or “hairy man” of our Aboriginal people, continues to manufacture modern-day stone implements at his lairs, hidden deep within the more remote regions of our eastern mountain ranges…

While ancient naturally-flaked stones possibly used by the first ancestral hominids would be virtually impossible to identify, deliberately-flaked stones are another matter, particularly if found in association with hominid fossil remains. The very presence of Eolithic ‘tools’ in the Australian archaeological record, while unacceptable today, will be more acceptable to future archaeologists unfettered by our present-day “political correctness” stupidity which denies any evidence of a pre-Aboriginal past.

These pre-Australoid, indeed pre-Homo erectus eoliths, like eoliths found elsewhere in the world, are often so ancient and weathered that their crudely worked surfaces are hardly recognisable from lumps of stone. At the time of writing of my first book, “Mysterious Australia” in 1995, I spoke of having found eoliths near the Bathurst giant hominid ‘megatool’ sites, at sites on the Blue Mountains, on the shorelines of long extinct Pleistocene lake systems of the New England district of New South Wales, as well as on the Murray River of South Australia.

I have since recovered these primitive ‘tools’ at sites over a wide area of Queensland, Central Australia and Western Australia. It seems certain that ancestral
hominids once spread across much of this continent.

Rex Gilroy
Australian Yowie Research Centre,
Katoomba, NSW
Monday 25th June 2007

Australian Yowie Research Index | Entire Web site © Rex & Heather Gilroy | URU Publications ® ™ Rex & Heather Gilroy. All Rights Reserved

Excerpts from - "The Yowie Mystery" - Living Fossils from the Dreamtime.
| Ch 1 | Ch 2 | Ch 3 | Ch 4 | Ch 5 | Ch 6 | Ch 7 | Ch 8 | Ch 9 | Ch 10 | Ch 11 | Ch 12 | Ch 13 | Ch 14 | Ch 15 | Ch 16 | Ch 17 | Ch 18 |
Mysterious Australia | Entire Web site © Rex & Heather Gilroy | URU Publications ® ™ Rex & Heather Gilroy. All Rights Reserved

Australian Yowie Research Centre Est...1976 by Rex Gilroy for the sole purpose of Scientific Study of the Australian Hairy - man
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