New artifacts suggest Indigenous people in Australia could be up to 20,000 years older than previously believed, Poland gets a royal visit, Jordan’s epic new hiking trail, and more in your weekly wrap of adventure travel news.
New research in Australia’s Kakadu National Park has proven that Aboriginal people have inhabited the continent for at least 65,000 years, with some newly-discovered artifacts potentially up to 80,000 years old. The findings, published in the journal Nature, are the result of archaeological digs that uncovered some 11,000 artifacts, and overturn previous estimations that Indigenous people have inhabited the continent for 47,000 to 60,000 years. The traditional landowners, the Mirrar people, retained ‘total control over the dig and the artifacts’, reported the Guardian on Thursday.
In deliciously tropical news, a Cook Island man has become the world’s first-ever coconut tree-climbing world champion. George Iona beat 16 competitors to take home the title, which he earned by climbing an eight-meter tree in under six seconds. Iona secured the win over pre-race favorite, Fiapa’i Ellio, by a slim one hundredth of a second.
A travel blogger and Instagrammer has been called out for posting images to her 467k followers that are said to be fake. In a story published by The Times titled ‘Fake views: blogger doctored holiday pics‘, the newspaper’s picture desk confirms that Amelia Liana’s envy-inducing shots were subject to a not-insignificant amount of photoshopping. One image, uploaded in May, featured Liana gazing out into an NYC skyline—one that didn’t feature the One World Trade Center, which was built in 2013. The Instagrammer has denied misleading her followers.
This year, Jordan opened the Jordan Trail, a 400-mile route that’s been dubbed ‘the Inca Trail of the Middle East’. As Emma Thomson writes for Adventure.com, the trail runs from Um Qais in the north to Aqaba on the Red Sea coastline, taking in 52 villages en route, as well as the UNESCO-listed city of Petra and Wadi Rum valley. US author, travel writer and TV presenter Andrew Evans—part of the team that completed the first-ever end-to-end hike of the trail–said: “[The trail] allows you to see the unabbreviated version of Jordan.”
Tinder has sent a pair of US students to Hawaii after a three-year text conversation went viral. Josh Avsec posted the humorous exchange with Michelle Arendas–which featured month-long delays in replying and various excuses–to Twitter, and it’s since gained over 30,000 retweets. Part-fairytale ending, part-great PR stunt, Tinder replied and offered to send the haphazard pair, who had previously never met, to a destination of their choice. “This is like some sort of dream”, tweeted Avsec. “A date in Hawaii is far more epic than I could have ever imagined.”
Elsewhere, Sir Ranulph Feinnes shares why he never travels with a toothbrush, stunning footage shows a whale playing with dolphins off Australia’s west coast, Disney releases photos of its much-anticipated Star Wars Land, and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge embark on a five-day tour of Poland.
