Cuddie Springs is a notable archaeological and paleontological site in the semi-arid zone of central northern New South Wales, Australia, near Carinda in Walgett Shire.

Cuddie Springs is an open site, with the fossil deposits preserved in a claypan on the floor of an ancient ephemeral lake.

The claypan fills with water after local rainstorms and often takes months to dry, a fact which facilitated the survival of fossils over a long period of time.

[7] Cuddie Springs is located within the semi-arid zone, but palynological evidence indicates that 40,000 years ago there was a large permanent lake surrounded by open shrub land suitable for supporting megafauna.

This staggered decline, mostly occurring in contexts independent of humans, is linked to environmental evidence for increasingly arid and erratic conditions since 400–300,000 years ago.

[8] The 10,000 years of co-habitation of humans and megafauna at Cuddie Springs that is the foundation of Wroe and Field's argument has been the subject of intense critical examination.

Cuddie Springs is unusual in having a dense deflation pavement that separates recent materials (such as cow bones) from the Pleistocene layers.

Gillespie and Brook add that cattle visiting the well may have pushed stone artefacts through the pavement into the Pleistocene layers during waterlogged conditions.

Several authors have suggested that the Pleistocene stone artefacts and megafauna bones may have derived from separate contexts that have become mixed by underground water flow.

[12] Gillespie and David suggest that the upright orientation of an unarticulated Genyornis femur in the Pleistocene layers at Cuddie Springs might be explained by sediment movement due to water flow.

[17] Gillespie and Brook comment that this still does not exclude an off-site origin of the bones (i.e. death of the animal) and subsequent fluvial transportation to Cuddie Springs.

[12] Field et al. (2006)[incomplete short citation] dispute the proposal that flood movement caused the combination of megafauna and stone artefacts.

[19][13] The uniqueness of archaeological and palaeontological finds from Cuddie Springs and its unusual stratigraphy have attracted detailed critiques that cast doubt on the integrity of the human-megafauna coexistence.