1,000 teeth and opium lamps among items found during Melbourne Metro Tunnel dig

An unprecedented archaeological dig is underway beneath Melbourne's CBD.

In order to make way for the Metro Tunnel — a rail network that will include five new stations — a team of more than 100 archaeologists, students and staff are overseeing excavations at two locations.

So far we have found more than 1000 human teeth and a coin worth $3000 through our archaeological investigations in the CBD pic.twitter.com/54e2Zc3fvp

— Metro Tunnel (@metrotunnelvic) 23 Αυγούστου 2018

Here's a look at some of the 500,000 artefacts they've found in the digs so far:

Piles of teeth washed down the sink

Yes. It's disgusting. More than 1,000 human teeth were found at one of the locations, next to the Young and Jackson pub on the corner of Flinders and Swanston streets.

Excavation director Meg Goulding said there used to be a dentist on the site.

"This guy clearly disposed of a lot of his teeth down the pipe, down the sink," Meg Goulding said.

"They gross me out. I mean I've excavated a lot of skeletal remains in my time, but there's something about disembodied teeth that is very unattractive."

The teeth, some of which could date back to 1898, are especially disgusting by modern standards.

"A lot of them are unattractive because they've got very big holes in them," Ms Goulding said.

"So they instantly say to you pain and agony, both in terms of people suffering for the length of time that they must have had some of these teeth in their mouths, but also just the extraction process."

A peek into industries past

A number of objects highlight the different businesses which have stood on the sites during the 180 years since the European settlement of Melbourne.

Hundreds of lead print types were discovered, left behind by a stationer and printer who worked in the area in the late 1800s.

There are also labels from James Dickson & Co ginger ale bottles, a company which started in a Richmond shed during the 1850s gold rush before moving to the CBD in 1869.

Heat-resistant ceramic crucibles may have been used in a printing workshop or sold by stationery shops.

The seedy underbelly of early Melbourne

Gambling dice and gaming discs have also been unearthed, mostly made from cattle bone or ivory.

At least 20 dice were recovered from 13 Swanston Street, a site formerly occupied by hotels, along with corks, corkscrews, glass tumblers, wine glasses, swizzle sticks and alcohol bottles.

Archaeologists also uncovered 34 glass discs which suggest that opium lamps were manufactured in the area.

Items left behind by wealthy patrons who would have visited the hotels include an opulent jet earring which probably fell through the floorboards, lost for more than a century.

Children's toys from a simpler time

Plenty of children's toys have also been uncovered, including a toy soldier that dates back to the 1850s.

It was likely made in Germany and depicts a British army drummer around the time of the Battle of Waterloo.

There's also a yellow bird-shaped whistle that dates back to at least the 1860s and the head from a china doll.

The doll is believed to be a Frozen Charlotte, which were popular toys that got their name from a song about a vain girl who refused to cover up and froze to death on a winter's night.

The connection to Aboriginal land

When the excavations from European settlement are complete, traditional owners will be invited on site to excavate older deposits.

Ms Goulding said the area was used by Indigenous people camping by the Yarra River.

"Towards the end of our historical archaeological program we then move into the Indigenous archaeological program."

What will happen to the artefacts?

The team is processing the hundreds of thousands of artefacts uncovered in the first four months of the dig.

"A conservator does conservation work on the very fragile ones and then the artefacts get catalogued and they get processed properly," Ms Goulding said.

"They're bagged up, labelled and then they get stored for future generations."

Some of them will be put on display at Metro Tunnel HQ located at 125-133 Swanston Street from September 24.

1,000 teeth and opium lamps among items found during Melbourne Metro Tunnel dig

Man searching for toilet stumbles across 49,000 year-old evidence of earliest human settlement in Australia

An Australian man searching for a toilet stumbled across the oldest-known evidence of Aboriginal settlement in existence. 

The chance discovery happened while Adnyamathanha elder Clifford Coulthard was surveying gorges in the area and “nature called”. 

He came across the arid site, known as Warratyi, which showed  Aboriginal Australians settled there 49,000 years ago, 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. 

The shelter, found 550 kilometres north of Adelaide, also contains the first reliably-dated evidence of human interaction with large or giant animals, known as megafauna. 

Lead author Giles Hamm, a consultant archaeologist and doctoral student at La Trobe University, found the site with Mr Coulthard.

"A man getting out of the car to go to the toilet led to the discovery of one of the most important sites in Australian prehistory,” Mr Hamm told ABC. 

"Nature called and Cliff walked up this creek bed into this gorge and found this amazing spring surrounded by rock art.”

Mr Hamm told how the pair noticed a rock shelter with a blackened roof and knew immediately it was a sign of human activity. 

However, despite realising people had probably used the shelter to light fires, the researchers had no idea of the significance of their find. 

For the past nine years, Mr Hamm and his team have recovered more than 4,300 artefacts from the one-metre-deep excavations, along with 200 bone fragments from 16 mammals and one reptile. 

Co-author professor Gavin Prideaux also noted the discovery of bones from the extinct giant wombat-like Diprotodon optatum, and eggs from an ancient giant bird. 

He also said the discovery was an important indication that humans were not responsible for the extinction of megafauna.

"The find undermines one of the supposed pillars of support for climate change, not humans, causing the extinctions because the site shows humans lived alongside these animals and hunted them," he explained.

He also said his research paper, published in Nature, "smashed several paradigms about Indigenous Australians".

"People were set up in arid southern Australia by about 50,000 years ago and they had all these amazing technologies much earlier than what we've thought,” he said. 

Previously, the oldest-known site in the arid zone, which accounts for roughly 70% of Australia’s land mass, dated back to 38,000 years and was found at Puritjarra in western central Australia.

"This discovery puts people moving south from the northern part of the continent to the southern interior a lot sooner than we thought," Mr Hamm said. 

However, he also claimed the land was likely to have been less arid when it was occupied by the first settlers. 

"In one sense they were trapped in the Flinders Ranges because once the climate changed [due to the last glacial maximum] it was too risky to move out of these well-watered ranges that had these permanent springs,” he said. 

Michael Westaway, palaeoanthropologist at Griffith University, confirmed this theory and recently participated in a genomic study that found modern Aboriginal Australians are the descendants of the first people to inhabit Australia, and they had adapted genetically to survive in the desert.

"Our DNA paper suggested the arid centre at 50,000 years ago was not really a barrier to the movement of people, and this seems to be what Giles is suggesting — people were able to migrate south quite quickly," Dr Westaway said.

"There is a Eurocentric view that material culture in Australia is quite simplistic and backward, but this helps rewrite that story."

Mr Coulthard said he had worked near to the Warratyi site when he was a teenager and had been told of ancients shelters in the area. 

However, he had forgotten the information and believes "the spirits showed me the road". 

He said the Adnyamathanha people were proud and happy about the discovery.  

Man searching for toilet stumbles across 49,000 year-old evidence of earliest human settlement in Australia