For me at least, it was the Dreamtime reference that was the crucial clue in this question, rather than the thing about the world's oldest civilisation.
What do we mean by "the world's oldest civilisation", anyway?
I have done some research into this matter (naturally), and it appears that what marks the aboriginal Australians out as the world's oldest civilisation is the fact that they have been genetically isolated for longer than any other people.
This was the finding of a DNA study carried out in 2016, and reported on the History.com website. History.com tells how "the majority of non–Africans stem from a single ancestral group of migrants who left Africa approximately 72,000 years ago and eventually spread across the other continents. While European and Asian ancestral groups became distinct in the genetic record around 42,000 years ago, the researchers say that occurred even earlier – approximately 58,000 years ago – in the case of indigenous Papuan and Australian ancestral groups as they ventured eastward."
So the aboriginal Australians have been genetically isolated for about 58,000 years - not 70,000.
Wikipedia, however, reckons the aboriginal civilisation to be somewhat older than that. It refers to "a 2011 genetic study by Ramussen et al.", which found that "the ancestors of the Aboriginal population split off from the Eurasian population between 62,000 and 75,000 [years ago], whereas the European and Asian populations split only 25,000 to 38,000 years [ago], indicating an extended period of Aboriginal genetic isolation. These Aboriginal ancestors migrated into South Asia and then into Australia, where they stayed, with the result that, outside of Africa, the Aboriginal peoples have occupied the same territory continuously longer than any other human populations. These findings suggest that modern Aboriginal peoples are the direct descendants of migrants who left Africa up to 75,000 years ago."
World Atlas.com suggests that the idea of aboriginal Australians being the world's oldest civilisation is a departure from the mainstream, and that "Mesopotamia civilization is considered the oldest in the world's history". But, it continues, "some researchers believe that the Aboriginal Australian [civilisation] is the oldest. The Aborigines can be traced back to 75,000 years ago but became a genetically distinct group about 50,000 years ago. It is believed that they first settled in Australia approximately 40,000 years ago and are considered the direct ancestors of the present–day Australians."
WorldAtlas lists the aboriginal Australians as No. 2 on its list of "10 of the World's Oldest Civilisations". Somewhat bizarrely, No. 1 are the Inca, who "flourished between 1438 AD and 1532 AD around present–day Peru, Ecuador, and Chile." Mentioning, as it does, a history dating back less than 600 years, I can't believe that WorldAtlas is ranking the Inca as older than the aboriginal Australians; but this seems to make a mockery of its numbering system.
Fascinating as all this is (and I'm not being sarcastic here), I don't think the matter of "the world's oldest civilisation" makes for a very good quiz question. As we've seen, experts disagree; and unless you're an expert, it's hard to know how the age of a civilisation is supposed to be defined – or even, in some cases, what makes "a civilisation". As I've suggested above, the clue to this question was in the mention of Dreamtime. But this also has its problems ...
According to Wikipedia, Dreamtime is "a term devised by early anthropologists to refer to a religio–cultural worldview attributed to Australian Aboriginal beliefs." Wikipedia goes on to suggest that the concept of what non–aboriginals refer to as Dreamntime has been widely misinterpreted; the idea that the aboriginals believe "that they live at the same time in both this world and in Dreamtime" (as suggested in the question) is just one way of looking at it. Wikipedia describes how the term is used "to represent Aboriginal concepts of 'time out of time' or 'everywhen', during which the land was inhabited by ancestral figures, often of heroic proportions or with supernatural abilities. These figures were often distinct from 'gods' as they did not control the material world and were not worshipped, but only revered."
© Macclesfield Quiz League 2019