The paper argues for a semiotic anthropological perspective that addresses established claims for earliest human culture on the Australian mainland (60,000 years). Claude Levi Strauss regarded the Arunta people/nation of the great Western inland desert as the world’s first sociologist, in terms of the reflexive deployment of structural patterns to their domestic culture. We can readily displace sociologist with semiologists. Lévi-Strauss’ work did not address geopolitical or ritualistic/narrative dimensions of the aboriginal semiosphere – in particular the dreamtime establishment of 500 nations, and separate languages, mythologies and territories. This cultural framework was dispersed through the archipelago to South East Asia and globally, with consequences that endure to today. It provides a theoretical and historical foundation, and a missing link in essential questions of origins, nature and scope of a semiotic trajectory of overall human evolution. For one thing, Australian indigenous culture(s) remained remarkably divergent, yet stable and peaceful until white settlement, arguably qualifying the black settlement of the continent as a civilization – a Southern phenomenon that contests the later imperial, militarised models of civilization in the Northern hemisphere. In an age of geopolitical unrest it is helpful to consider the relevance of first indigenous culture(s) for our contemporary world.