RIO TINTO KEPT DESTRUCTION OF ICE AGE AUSTRALIA HERITAGE SITE SECRET

A Rio Tinto Ltd. forerunner failed to protect 18,000-year-old artifacts showing how people lived during the last Ice Age, part of destruction that the mining giant kept secret for decades, an Australian Aboriginal group alleged, Melanie Burton reported for Reuters.

The group said that Rio, despite pledges to improve how it protects Indigenous heritage after its destruction of sacred sites last year, did not come clean about the 1990s destruction of heritage at an iron ore mine that local Aboriginal people still do not have access to.

Australian mining "is an industry that hasn’t behaved responsibly and an industry that needs far greater oversight in heritage protection and agreement making," the Wintawari Guruma Aboriginal Corp. (WGAC) said in a statement.

The troubled relationship between mining, a core industry for Australia's economy, and the nation's Aboriginal heritage attracted global attention last year when Rio, with state approval, blew up two ancient rock shelters considered sacred to Indigenous people in Western Australia.

Outrage at the legal destruction featured in Black Lives Matter protests in a country where Aboriginal people have long suffered higher rates of imprisonment, unemployment and lower life expectancy. The furor led Rio to replace top executives and promise to overhaul its heritage protection practices.

Friday's claims, in a submission to a government inquiry, concern different sites in the same region, around the Marandoo iron ore mine. The group said it had learned that material dating back at least 18,000 years and other artifacts had been thrown into a Darwin rubbish heap.

The Aboriginal group's submission highlights an Australian legal structure that has long greenlighted mining development at the expense of historically important cultural sites.

"Any site dating from the last Ice Age is significant because people were using these sites as refuges, so we can get a sense of how they were reacting to glacial conditions," said Duncan Wright, a specialist in Indigenous archaeology at Australian National University.

"If you had sites of this significance in England, they would be protected - it's like destroying Stonehenge," said Wright, who has not seen the material. The sites could, in fact, have been significantly older, given the technology available in the 1990s, he said.

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