A coin discovery could rewrite Australian history.
Five copper coins and an old map rediscovered by an Australian scientist and professor could change Australia’s history.
Ian McIntosh, currently teaching at Indiana University, plans to visit the map site marked by an X. It turns out, the coins discovered there are older than current historical understanding permits.
This, he feels, introduces the possibility that ships from afar could have landed on Australian shores much earlier than currently believed.
The coins were uncovered in some beach sand by an Australian soldier during World War II. He put them away for safekeeping and rediscovered them in 1979.
Closer examination has since shown the coins to be over 1000 years old and from the former Kilwa sultanate, now a World Heritage ruin near Tanzania.
Now that they’re known to be from between 900s and 1300s, archeologists just need to figure out how and when they got to the Australian beach.
Another African coin has toppled some long-accepted theories. The recent discovery of a 600 year-old piece in Kenya points to the Chinese as being the first to trade with East Africa, not the Portuguese as previously thought.
