Mungo man

Fifty thousand years ago, a lush landscape greeted the first

Australians making their way towards the south-east of the
continent. Temperatures were cooler than now. Megafauna—giant
prehistoric animals
such as marsupial lions, goannas and the rhinoceros-sized
diprotodon—were abundant. The Lake Mungo remains are three
prominent sets of fossils which tell the archeologists the story:
Mungo Man lived around the shores of Lake Mungo with his family.
When he was young Mungo Man lost his two lower canine teeth,
possibly knocked out in a ritual. He grew into a man nearly 1.7m
in height. Over the years his molar teeth became worn and
scratched, possibly from eating a gritty diet or stripping the long
leaves of water reeds with his teeth to make twine. As Mungo Man
grew older his bones ached with arthritis, especially his right
elbow, which was so damaged that bits of bone were completely
worn out or broken
away. Such wear and tear is typical of people who have used a
woomera to throw spears over many years. Mungo Man reached a
good age for the hard life of a hunter-gatherer, and died when he
was about 50. His family mourned for him, and carefully buried
him in the lunette, on his back with his hands crossed in his lap,
and sprinkled with red ochre. Mungo Man is the oldest known
example in the world of such a ritual.

This treasure-trove of history was found by the University of

Melbourne geologist Professor Jim Bowler in 1969. He was
searching for ancient lakes and came across the charred remains
of Mungo Lady,
who had been cremated. And in 1974, he found a second
complete skeleton, Mungo Man, buried 300 metres away. Using
carbon-dating, a technique only reliable to around 40,000 years
old, the skeleton was
first estimated at 28,000 to 32,000 years old. The comprehensive
study of 25 different sediment layers at Mungo concludes that
both graves are 40,000 years old.
This is much younger than the 62,000 years Mungo Man was
attributed with in 1999 by a team led by Professor Alan Thorne, of
the Australian National University. The modern day story of the
science of Mungo also has its fair share of rivalry. Because Thorne
is the country’s leading opponent of the Out of
Africa theory—that Homo sapiens had a single place of origin. “Dr
Alan Thorne supports the multi-regional explanation (that modern
humans arose simultaneously in Africa, Europe and Asia from one
of our predecessors, Homo erectus, who left Africa more than 1.5
million years ago.) if Mungo Man was
descended from a person who had left Africa in the past 200,000
years, Thorne argues, then his mitochondrial DNA should have
looked like that of the other samples.”

However, Out of Africa supporters are not about to let go of their

beliefs because of the Australian research, Professor Chris
Stringer, from the Natural History Museum in London, UK, said
that the research community would want to see the work
repeated in other labs before major conclusions were drawn from
the Australian research. But even assuming the DNA sequences
were correct, Professor
Stringer said it could just mean that there was much more genetic
diversity in the past than was previously realised. There is no
evidence here that the ancestry of these Australian fossils goes
back a million or two million years. It’s much more likely that
modern humans came out of Africa.” For Bowler, these debates
are irritating speculative distractions from the study’s main
findings. At 40,000 years old, Mungo Man and Mungo Lady remain
Australia’s oldest human burials and the earliest evidence on
Earth of cultural sophistication, he says. Modern humans had not
even reached North America by this time. In 1997, Pddbo’s
research group recovered a mtDNA fingerprint from the Feldholer
Neanderthal skeleton uncovered in Germany in 1865-the first
Neanderthal remains ever found.

In its 1999 study, Thome’s team used three techniques to date

Mungo Man at 62,000 years old, and it stands by its figures. It
dated bone, teeth enamel and some sand. Bowler has strongly
challenged the
results ever since. Dating human bones is “notoriously
unreliable”, he says. As well, the sand sample Thome’s group
dated was taken hundreds of metres from the burial site. “You
don’t have to be a gravedigger…to realize the age of the sand is
not the same as the age of the grave,” says Bowler.
F Thorne counters that Bowler’s team used one dating technique,
while his used three. Best practice is to have at least two methods
produce the same result. A Thorne team member, Professor
Rainer Griin, says the fact that the latest results were consistent
between laboratories doesn’t mean they are absolutely correct.
We now have two data sets that are contradictory. I do not have a
plausible explanation.” Now, however, Thorne says the age of
Mungo Man is irrelevant to this origins debate. Recent fossils finds
show
modern humans were in China 110,000 years ago. “So he has got
a long time to turn up in Australia. It doesn’t matter if he is
40,000 or 60,000 years old.

Dr Tim Flannery, a proponent of the controversial theory that

Australia’s megafauna was wiped out 46,000 years ago in a
“blitzkrieg” of hunting by the arriving people, also claims the new
Mungo dates support this view. In 2001 a member of Bowler’s
team, Dr Richard Roberts of Wollongong University, along with
Flannery, director of the South Australian Museum, published
research on their blitzkrieg
theory. They dated 28 sites across the continent, arguing their
analysis showed the megafauna died out suddenly 46,000 years
ago. Flannery praises the Bowler team’s research on Mungo Man
as “the most thorough and rigorous dating” of ancient human
remains. He says the finding that humans arrived at Lake
Mungo between 46,000 and 50,000 years ago was a critical time
in Australia’s history. There is no evidence of a dramatic climatic
change then, he says. “It’s my view that humans arrived and
extinction
took place in almost the same geological instant.”

Bowler, however, is skeptical of Flannery’s theory and says the

Mungo study provides no definitive new evidence to support it. He
argues that climate change at 40,000 years ago was more intense
than had
been previously realized and could have played a role in the
megafauna’s [Link] blame the earliest Australians for their
complete extinction is drawing along bow.”