40 SMITHSONIAN.COM | September 2019
Mungo Man’s
casket was
made from an
8,000-year-old
red gum. Aborig-
inal people use
the sap from the
tree for medici-
nal purposes.T WAS ONE OF THE MORE cinematic funeral car-
avans in recent memory. In November 2017, a black
vintage hearse trundled across the verdant Australian
sheep country west of Sydney toward the shimmering
deserts of the outback. Laid out inside was a beautiful
rough-hewn casket crafted from 8,000-year-old fos-
silized wood. A convoy of Aboriginal elders and activ-
ists followed close behind. At every stop on the way—
in sonorously named bush towns like Wagga Wagga,
Narrandera and Gundagai—the vehicle was met by
jubilant crowds. In Hay, two Aboriginal men escorted
the hearse into a park, where an honor guard of teen-
age boys carried the coffin to an ancient purification
ceremony that involved cleansing it with smoking
eucalyptus leaves. The rite was accompanied by tra-
ditional songs to didgeridoo music, dancing men in
body paint and a slightly more contemporary Aus-
sie “sausage sizzle.” After dark, a security guard stood
vigil over the vehicle and its contents.
At last, on the third morning of the 500-mile trek,
the hearse turned alone onto an unpaved desert
highway toward the eerie shores of Lake Mungo,
which despite its name has been a dry moonscape
for the past 16,000 years. There, a crowd of several
hundred people, including Australian government
officials, archaeologists and representatives of Ab-
original groups from across the continent, fell into a
reverent silence when they spotted the ghostly vehi-
cle on the horizon kicking up orange dust.
The hearse was bearing the remains of an individual
who died in this isolated spot over 40,000 years ago —
one of the oldest Homo sapiens ever found outside
Africa. His discovery in 1974 reshaped the saga of the
Australian continent and our entire view of prehistor-
ic world migration. The skeleton of Mungo Man, as he
is known, was so well preserved that scientists could
establish he was about 50 years of age, with his right
elbow arthritic from throwing a spear all his life and
his teeth worn, possibly from stripping reeds for twine.
Now he was returning home in a hearse whose li-
cense plate read, with typical Aussie humor, MUN-
GO1. He would be cared for by his descendants, the
Ngiyampaa, Mutthi Mutthi and Paakantyi people,
often referred to as the 3TTGs (Traditional Tribal
Groups). “The elders had waited a long, long time
for this to happen,” says Robert Kelly, an Aboriginal
heritage officer who was present. Also standing in
the crowd was a white-haired geologist named Jim
Bowler, who had first found the skeleton in the shift-