September 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 47tance—the nearest source was over 130 miles away—and had
been either painted onto the body or sprinkled over the grave.
“We suddenly realized this was a ritual site of extraordinary
significance,” Bowler recalled. “It was a shock. You’re sitting
in the sand and suddenly realize that something beyond you
has happened.” The next surprise came when carbon dat-
ing put “Mungo Man” at 40,000 to 42,000
years old—some 5,000 years older than the
Cro-Magnon sites in Western Europe. 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 spe-
cies left Africa to cross the Asian
landmass 70,000 years ago, and
reached Australia 47,000 years
ago. (Others suggest the Ab-
original arrival in Australia was
60,000 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. “Up until Mungo, Ab-
originals had been frequently denigrated,” Bowler said blunt-
ly. “They were ignorant savages, treacherous. Suddenly here
was a new indication of extraordinary sophistication.” The
reverent treatment of the body—the oldest ritual burial site
ever found—revealed a concern for the afterlife eons before
the Egyptian pyramids. Two of Mungo Man’s canine teeth, in
the lower jaw, were also missing, possibly the result of an ad-
olescent initiation ceremony, and there were the remains of
a circular fireplace found nearby. “It took me a long time to
digest the implications,” Bowler said. Today, Aboriginal peo-
ple still use smoke to cleanse the dead. “It’s the same ritual,
and there it was 40,000 years ago.” All the evidence pointed
to a spectacular conclusion: Aboriginal people belong to the
oldest continuous culture on the planet.
NEWS OF MUNGO MAN’S discovery, presented as a tri-
umph by scientists, provoked outrage in the Aboriginal com-
munities; they were furious that they had not been consulted
about their ancestor’s removal from his homeland. “I read
about it in the newspaper like everybody else,” recalls Mary
Pappin, a Mutthi Mutthi elder. “We were really upset.” The
first quiet protests over archaeological work had begun years
earlier over Mungo Lady, led by her mother, Alice Kelly, who
would turn up with other women at new digs and demand an
explanation, carrying a dictionary so she could understand
the jargon. “My mum wrote letters,” recalls her daughter. “So
many letters!” Removing Mungo Man seemed the height of
scientific arrogance. Tensions reached such a point by the
end of the 1970s that the 3TTs placed an embargo on excava-
tion 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 root-
less nomads, ignoring their deep spiritual
connection to the land based on the my-
thology of the Dreamtime. An undeclared
frontier war followed, involving massacres
and enforced removals. Whites “harvest-
ed” Aboriginal skeletons, often by pillag-
ing grave sites or even after bloodbaths, for
study and display in museums in Britain,
Europe and the States, in some cases to
“prove” that indigenous races were lower
on the evolutionary scale than Anglo-Sax-
ons. The macabre trade continued in Aus-tralia until the 1940s (as it did for Native American remains
in the U.S.); the last official expedition, a joint Australian-U.S.
effort involving the Smithsonian Institution and others that
would become controversial, occurred in 1948. Aboriginal
people felt each removal as a visceral affront. (See “Epilogue
for the Ancestors,” p. 46.)
This bleak situation began to change in the 1960s when, in-
fluenced 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 1970s, owner-
ship of their traditional homelands. The standoff between
the 3TTGs and scientists began to thaw in 1992, when ANU
agreed to return Mungo Lady to the traditional owners. Re-
lations improved as young Aboriginal people were trained as
rangers, archaeologists and heritage officials, and in 2007, 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
2014, he wrote in a widely publicized editorial that he felt a
responsibity to help Mungo Man go home. “I was clobbered!”
he laughs now. “They said, ‘Bowler’s gone off tilting at wind-
mills! He’s out there like Don Quixote.’ ” Scientists argued that
the skeleton should be kept safe, since future developments in
DNA research and improved X-ray tests might one day reveal
new insights about the diet, life expectancy, health and cul-
tural practices of early humans, or about mankind’s origins.
(Did Homo sapiens evolve from a single “African Eve” or devel-
op in separate locations? Did our species overwhelm the other
known human species such as Homo neanderthalensis and
Homo erectus, or interbreed with them?)
The process of returning Aboriginal remains sped up in 2002,“IT FELT LIKE A BEGINNING, NOT AN END. IT WAS THE BEGINNINGOF THE HEALING, NOT JUST FOR US, BUT FOR AUSTRALIA.”