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Search for:. Search Articles. Search Store. Post Tags aboriginal australia archaeology fossil fossils history of australia New South Wales palaeontology. He saw the pale shapes in the desert below and recognized them as fossilized lake beds. Back at the Australian National University ANU in Canberra, he suggested to a middle-aged student, a soulful geologist working on ancient climate change in Australia, Jim Bowler, to investigate.
Bowler had no idea that the visit would transform his life. Bowler was indeed sitting in the front seat of a silver Nissan, tapping away on his laptop and surrounded by a chaos of notes, pens and electrical cords. He studied for a time to be a Jesuit priest. Bowler suggested I clear some space and hop into the passenger seat so that we could drive around the corner to Port Phillip Bay.
There, sitting in the car and gazing at seagulls over the beach, he conjured the outback. Bowler first went to Lake Mungo in to map ice age geology. But if you follow water, you follow the story of human beings.
Inevitably, I found myself walking in the footsteps of ancient people. He spent weeks exploring on a motorbike, naming the lakes and the major geological layers after sheep stations: Gol Gol, Zanci, Mungo. Then came part of a jawbone, followed by a human tooth.
The body had been burned, the bones crushed and returned to the fire. After they carried the bones back to Canberra in a suitcase, one of the party, an ANU physical anthropologist named Alan Thorne, spent six months reconstructing the skull from fragments. The result proved beyond doubt that this was Homo sapiens —a slender female, around 25 years old. When Mungo Lady was dated at 26, years, it destroyed the lingering 19th-century racist notion, suggested by misguided followers of Charles Darwin, that Aboriginal people had evolved from a primitive Neanderthal-like species.
Smithsonian researchers forge a new policy for returning human remains to indigineous people overseas — Emily Toomey. A collaboration among Australian institutions, the Smithsonian and National Geographic, the ten-month venture yielded thousands of biological specimens and cultural items, which are still being studied today. The Aboriginal bark paintings commissioned by the researchers sparked global awareness of this art form. By , the museum, working with officials and indigenous groups in Australia, had returned the Arnhem Land remains on loan from the Australian government, and the museum is working closely with Aboriginal groups to repatriate remains collected from other places in Australia.
On February 26, , by now doing his PhD, he was again at Lake Mungo when unusually torrential summer rains hit. We were miles from any other building. This time, ANU archaeologists hurried to the scene. They only had to smooth the sand away to find an intact male skeleton. He had been ceremoniously buried; his hands were folded over the pelvis and traces of red ocher enveloped him from cranium to loin. The ocher had been carried a great distance—the nearest source was over miles away—and had been either painted onto the body or sprinkled over the grave.
The researchers retested Mungo Lady; the new data showed that she had lived around the same time as Mungo Man. The news revolutionized the timeline of human migration, proving that Homo sapiens had arrived in Australia far earlier than scientists imagined as part of the great migration from East Africa across Asia and into the Americas. Post-Mungo, the most conservative starting date is that our species left Africa to cross the Asian landmass 70, years ago, and reached Australia 47, years ago.
Others suggest the Aboriginal arrival in Australia was 60, years ago, which pushes the starting date of migration back even further. Just as revolutionary was what Mungo Man meant for the understanding of Aboriginal culture. Suddenly here was a new indication of extraordinary sophistication. Today, Aboriginal people still use smoke to cleanse the dead. Tensions reached such a point by the end of the s that the 3TTs placed an embargo on excavation at Lake Mungo.
Mungo Man surfaced precisely at a time when Australia was wrestling with a crisis in race relations that dates back to the colonial era.
The first British settlers had mistakenly dismissed the Aboriginal people as rootless nomads, ignoring their deep spiritual connection to the land based on the mythology of the Dreamtime. An undeclared frontier war followed, involving massacres and enforced removals.
The macabre trade continued in Australia until the s as it did for Native American remains in the U. Aboriginal people felt each removal as a visceral affront.
This bleak situation began to change in the s when, influenced by the civil rights movement and Native American campaigns in the States, Aboriginal activists demanded that they be given citizenship, the vote and, by the s, ownership of their traditional homelands. Relations improved as young Aboriginal people were trained as rangers, archaeologists and heritage officials, and in , the 3TTGs gained joint management of the parks. But an impasse remained over the fate of Mungo Man.
It was support from Jim Bowler that tipped the balance. In , he wrote in a widely publicized editorial that he felt a responsibity to help Mungo Man go home. Did our species overwhelm the other known human species such as Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus , or interbreed with them? A network of heritage officers began systematically connecting with Aboriginal communities all over Australia to empty museum collections. You got any of my ancestors? Michael Pickering in Canberra was one of many older white Australian museum workers who have seen a complete reversal of attitudes in their lifetimes.
Science is not a bad thing. But society benefits from other forms of knowledge as well. We learn so much more from repatriation than letting bones gather dust in storage. All these emotions came together in November as the hand-carved casket was laid out at Lake Mungo and covered with leaves. As the smoking ceremony began, recalls Jason Kelly, a willy willy dust devil swept from the desert and across the casket. By , years ago the Willandra Lakes formed as low-lying basins filled with water from the mountains to the east.
The levels of the lakes fluctuated over the next , years depending on the warming or cooling of the climate. About 40, years ago the climate became consistently drier and the world plunged into a cold, glacial phase from 22, years ago.
By 10, years ago the last Ice Age was over and a relatively stable, semi-arid climate settled over the area. Animal bones emerging from the Lake Mungo lunette. They would have found an area full of life. People could have waded and hunted for fish, or dived for yabbies and shellfish. The margins of the lake were well vegetated with reed beds and eucalyptus trees and would have attracted a variety of waterbirds, frogs, mammals and reptiles.
They built fires to cook their meals, made tools from stone, and used ochre to paint their bodies. Today, the Paakantji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngyimpaa people of the region continue to have close connections to the Willandra Lakes.
The Willandra Lakes, including Lake Mungo, are included on the World Heritage list in recognition of their cultural and natural significance. In geologist Jim Bowler discovered bones emerging from the Lake Mungo lunette eroded dunes that display major sedimentary layers. The next year he returned with archaeologists John Mulvaney and Rhys Jones, and with assistance from colleagues at the Australian National University they determined the bones were of a female human.
Moreover, they discovered that Mungo Lady, as she was named, had been ritually buried. First she had been cremated, then her bones were crushed, burned again and buried in the lunette.
Five years later Jim Bowler found more bones, these turned out to be the skeleton of a male. Analysis has shown that Mungo Man was around 50 years old — a good age for a hunter-gatherer. Like Mungo Lady, he had been ritually buried by being placed on his back with his hands crossed in his lap and his body sprinkled with red ochre.
These two discoveries are the oldest human remains found anywhere in Australia, and some of the earliest anatomically modern human remains discovered anywhere in the world. The ritual practices identified, namely the cremation of Mungo Lady and the ceremonial burial of Mungo Man, also provide some of the earliest evidence for these cultural practices.
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