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When one-third of the Australian continent was submerged, ancestors of the world’s oldest living cultures were there to see it. Lands that once were wide open to exploration and home to many people flooded as the ocean crept inland following the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago. Traces of human occupation vanished underwater. Aboriginal people living at the farthest reaches of Australia’s ancient coastline would have steadily retreated; those living inland would have witnessed the sea transforming their country. In Murujuga—once an interior rocky mountain range and now a coastal archipelago and peninsula in Western Australia—ancient people recorded the sea change in stone through artworks depicting newly arrived marine life and other animals, now extinct.