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Aborginal
people pay their
respects as a
hearse carries
the remains of
Mungo Man and
104 other ances-
tors to their final
resting place at
Lake Mungo.ing sands and had lobbied to have it returned to the
Aboriginal people. Like many indigenous groups, the
tribes believe that a person’s spirit is doomed to wan-
der the earth endlessly if his remains are not laid to
rest “in Country,” as the expression goes. Jason Kel-
ly, a Mutthi Mutthi representative, was in the hearse
on the last leg of the journey. “It felt like a wave was
washing over me,” he recalls. “A really peaceful feel-
ing, like everything was in slow motion.”
But even as the long-awaited, deeply symbolic
scene was unfolding, scientists were making appeals
to the Aboriginal elders not to bury the bones, argu-
ing that the materials are part of a universal human
patrimony and too important not to be studied fur-
ther. In fact, from the moment he had been discov-
ered, Mungo Man was entangled in bitter political
battles over the “repatriation” of ancestral remains,
a kind of dispute that would echo around the world,
pitting researchers against indigenous peoples as di-
verse as Native Americans in Washington State, the
Herero of Namibia, the Ainu of Japan and the Sámi
of Norway, Finland and Sweden.
Bone collecting has been a key part of Western
science since the Enlightenment, yet it’s now often
assailed as unethical, and nowhere more so than in
Australia. After generations of ignoring Aboriginal
appeals, the country is now a world leader in return-
ing human remains as a form of apology for its trag-
ic colonial history. “The center of the debate is: Whoowns the past?” says Dan Rosendahl, ex-
ecutive officer of the Willandra Lakes Re-
gion World Heritage Area. “Science says
it belongs to everybody. People tried to
lock onto that in Australia. But there were
1,700 generations before Europeans got
here, so it’s clearly not everybody’s past.”
To better understand the growing
chasm between the Western, scientif-
ic worldview and the spiritual outlook
of indigenous cultures, I made my own
expedition around the interior of Austra-
lia, meeting Aboriginal elders, museum
curators and scientists key to the Mun-
go Man’s strange and fascinating saga.
My final goal was the hallucinogenic
landscape of Lake Mungo itself, which is
gaining cult status among Aussie travel-
ers as the Rift Valley of the Pacific Rim.
At its core, Aboriginal people find the
Western desire to place them within hu-
man history irrelevant. Scientists trace
human origins to Africa 2.5 million years
ago, when the genus Homo first evolved.
The species Homo sapiens emerged
in East Africa 200,000 years ago, and
began to migrate from the continent
around 60,000 years ago. (Other species
had likely first migrated two million years ago; Nean-
derthals evolved 400,000 years ago.) The Aboriginal
people believe that they have lived in Australia since
it was sung into existence during the Dreamtime. The
carbon dating of Mungo Man came as no surprise to
them. “To us blackfellas, we’ve been here forever,”
said Daryl Pappin, a Mutthi Mutthi archaeological
fieldworker. “That date, 42,000 years, was published
as a ‘discovery.’ That’s not true. They’ve just put a
timeline on it that whitefellas can accept.”MY SOJOURN BEGAN IN Australia’s capital, Can-
berra—Down Under’s version of Brasília—an artificial
city created as a gateway to the continent’s vast hin-
terland. Today, its broad, empty highways are lined
with Art Deco monuments and avant-garde structures
scattered like giant Lego blocks. By its serene lake, I
met Michael Pickering, director of the Repatriation
Program at the National Museum of Australia, which
oversaw Mungo Man’s hand-over. “Other indigenous
communities were watching worldwide,” Pickering,
a soft-spoken character in his early 60s who travels
the world dealing with human remains, said proud-
ly as we climbed into his SUV. Most skeletons in
museums are only 500 years old and in poor condi-
tion, he said, especially if they were found in damp
coastal areas, so their return arouses little scientific