An article saying the “ruins of an ancient city” were found in the Australian Outback is fake.
It was posted on bogus news site World News Daily Report, which describes itself as satirical in nature.
“A team of archaeologists working for the Australian National University, who were proceeding to an excavation near the sandstone rock formation of Uluru, has unearthed the ruins of a large precolonial city dating back to more than 1500 years ago. The important number of tombs and artefacts already discovered on the site suggests that it could have been the capital of an ancient empire, completely unknown to historians until now,” it reads. It adds: “Professor Reese believes that the city could have been abandoned after some climatic changes in the 9th Century brought a dramatic decrease in the level of rainfall, making the city unsustainable.”
But according to a disclaimer, the whole thing isn’t real.
“World News Daily Report is a news and political satire web publication, which may or may not use real names, often in semi-real or mostly fictitious ways. All news articles contained within worldnewsdailyreport.com are fiction, and presumably fake news. Any resemblance to the truth is purely coincidental, except for all references to politicians and/or celebrities, in which case they are based on real people, but still based almost entirely in fiction,” it says.
The Australia city article had tens of thousands of shares on Facebook.
One person wrote in the comments section: “Goes to prove what we have been saying for many years the Aboriginals were not the first inhabitant to the land and this was proven recently in southern WA where very old skeletons and bones were found that predate the aborigionals.”
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