Whether it’s throwing salt over your shoulder after you spill it, pinching someone who isn’t wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day or a special tea that your grandma swears can cure any ailment, families, cultures and social groups have rituals and traditions that connect generation to generation.

These practices are part of what makes someone feel part of a community, and what makes that community unique from any other.

Now, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of a ritual more than 12,000 years old — and used for 500 generations.

Cloggs Cave is a small domed limestone cavity in southeastern Australia on the land of the GunaiKurnai aboriginal people, according to a study published July 1 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

First excavated in the 1970s, the cave contains a large number of GunaiKurnai artifacts from various points in their history, dating as far back as 23,000 years ago, according to the study.

Many of the artifacts have been identified by the GunaiKurnai as items used in rituals for magic and medicine, from crystal quartz to arrangements of stones.

“Local ethnography and current GunaiKurnai knowledge document that caves such as Cloggs Cave were never used for general occupation in GunaiKurnai Country; the lack of archaeological food remains in such caves is consistent with the ethnography,” according to the study. “Rather, the caves were the retreats of mulla-mullung, powerful medicine men and women who practiced magic and rituals in secluded places.”

In 2020, researchers were invited by GunaiKurnai Aboriginal Elders to conduct another excavation at Cloggs Cave to document the rituals once held inside.

Researchers found two small fireplaces, one about the size of the palm of your hand, that each had a single stick partially burned, according to a July 2 news release from Monash University.

The sticks, stems of Casuarina, had been shaped and then smeared in fat, either from an animal or a person, before they were burned.

A chemical analysis of the sticks found that they were 11,000 and 12,000 years old, respectively, meaning they were used during the end of the last Ice Age in Australia, according to the release.

“The ritual involved fastening something belonging to the sick person to the end of a throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat. The throwing stick was then stuck slanting in the ground before a fire was lit underneath it,” according to the release. “The mulla-mullung would then chant the name of the sick person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete.”

Archaeologists and current GunaiKurnai people know how this ritual was carried out because it was still used as late as the 19th century when ethnographer Alfred Howitt described the practice in 1887, according to the study. He documented “sorcerers” and “wizards” among the GunaiKurnai who performed magic in secluded places “away from prying eyes” to heal those who were dying, researchers said.

Howitt also wrote that the practice could be used to harm others, according to the study. Mulla-mullung, the healers, would put an item belonging to the person they wished to harm at the end of the stick before it was burned and then sing their name until the stick fell and “the charm is complete,” Howitt wrote.

“The practice still exists,” Howitt wrote, according to the study.

Researchers believe this may be the oldest example of a specific practice persisting within a culture, according to the release.

“The connection of these archaeological finds with recent GunaiKurnai practices demonstrates 12,000 years of knowledge-transfer,” Bruno David, a professor from the Monash Indigenous Studies Center, said in the release. “Nowhere else on Earth has archaeological evidence of a very specific cultural practice previously been tracked so far back in time.”

The discovery also marks an important partnership between researchers and GunaiKurnai, who were excluded from previous archaeological projects in the cave, according to the release.

“For these artifacts to survive is just amazing. They’re telling us a story. They’ve been waiting here all this time for us to learn from them,” GunaiKurnai Elder Uncle Russell Mullett said in the release. “A reminder that we are a living culture still connected to our ancient past. It’s a unique opportunity to be able to read the memoirs of our Ancestors and share that with our community.”

Aboriginal groups in Australia are considered “one of the world’s oldest living cultures,” researchers said. The first lineages moved into Australia 50,000 years ago, at the same time that other humans moved out of Africa, according to a 2018 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cloggs Cave is located in southern Victoria in southeastern Australia.