Ancient land area could have housed half a million people and was 1.6 times the size of Great Britain. The underwater territory of about 390,000 square kilometers was so large that it could have functioned as a passage from present-day Indonesia to Australia.
The scientists who found the find, said that the "complex landscape" that existed on the northwest shelf of Australia "does not resemble the landscape found on our continent today" The data show that between 71,000 and 59,000 years ago, the sea level was 40 meters lower than it is today.