The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape presented a special challenge for firefighters battling Australian bushfires in recent weeks. Crews normally use heavy machinery to contain blazes like the one started by a lightning strike near the national park in December. But at the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape—the site of a 6,600-year-old aquaculture system designed for harvesting short-finned eels—firefighters had to fight on foot. Now, with the brush cleared by flames, a new section of the ancient network has emerged.

Though the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape only became a Unesco World Heritage Site last July, it’s actually older than both the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge. For millennia, the Gunditjmara people indigenous to the region engineered the volcanic landscape’s lava flows and wetlands to catch short-finned eels for food and trade. Interestingly, reported Tracey Shelton for Al Jazeeralast October, some of the fish traps in what is now the Budj Bim National Park remain functional today.

“You don’t really see [this kind of system] anywhere else in Australia until European agriculture,†Ben Marwick, an archaeologist at the University of Washington, tells the Washington Post’s Kim Bellware. “It shows us they had a high level of technical skill, understanding of physics and of the natural environment.â€

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in the last few days i watched a video (cannot recall the channel) and the narrator spoke of mr. peanut – a reference for who would be taken out next. she theorized it would be jimmy carter.  perhaps that was too obvious…