The 275,000-
acre Mungo
National Park
is home to
large numbers
of kangaroos,
emus and pink
cockatoos.inside his pickup truck, where he likes to work. “He’s
a bit strange,” she said, shaking her head as she led me
up the driveway. “But I suppose all academics are.”
Bowler was indeed sitting in the front seat of a
silver Nissan, tapping away on his laptop and sur-
rounded by a chaos of notes, pens and electrical
cords. “This is the only place I can get a little peace,”
he laughed. Although he has long been a universi-
ty professor, his lanky frame and sun-beaten skin
were reminders of his youth farming potatoes and
mustering cattle in the Snowy Mountains, as well
as his decades working as a field geologist in some
of Australia’s harshest corners. He was dressed as
if he were about to head out on safari any minute,
with a khaki Bushman’s vest and an Akubra hat by
his side, although his white chin beard gave him the
air of an Edwardian theologian. (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 1968 to map
ice age geology. “I could see the impact of
climatic change on the landscape,” he ex-
plained. “The basins were like gauges. But
if you follow water, you follow the story of
human beings. Inevitably, I found myself
walking in the footsteps of ancient people.”
Bowler realized that the exposed strata of
the lunettes created an X-ray of the land-
scape over the last 100 millennia. He spent
weeks exploring on a motorbike, naming
the lakes and the major geological layers
after sheep stations: Gol Gol, Zanci, Mungo.
“All sorts of things were popping out of the
ground that I had not expected to see,” he re-
called. “I would find shells and stone flakes
that looked transported by humans.” The
strata placed them at well over 20,000 years
old, but archaeologists wouldn’t believe
him: The conventional wisdom was the Ab-
original people arrived in faraway northern
Australia 20,000 years ago at the earliest.
His first discovery—a skeleton that
would be dubbed “Mungo Lady”—was, in
retrospect, a haphazard affair. On July 15,
1968, Bowler spotted charcoal and bone fragments
by Mungo’s shoreline, but the news was greeted
with indifference back at ANU. It took eight months
before he and two colleagues wangled a research
grant—$94 to cover fuel for a VW Kombi bus and
two nights in a motel. When the trio cleared away
the sand, “out dropped a piece of cranium,” Bowler
recalls. 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 an-
thropologist named Alan Thorne, spent six months
reconstructing the skull from 500 fragments. The
result proved beyond doubt that this was Homo sa-
piens—a slender female, around 25 years old. The
discovery coincided with the pioneering days of
“new archaeology,” using scientific techniques such
as carbon dating (which measures carbon-14, a radio-
active isotope of organic matter) to place artifacts in
specific time frames. When Mungo Lady was dated at
26,000 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.
But it was Bowler’s discovery of Mungo Man five
years later that made world headlines. On February 26,
1974, by now doing his PhD, he was again at Lake Mun-
go when unusually torrential summer rains hit. “There
was a pristine new surface on the dunes,” he recalls. He
went back to where he had found Mungo Lady and fol-
lowed the same geological “horizon.” He spotted white
bone. “I brushed away the sand and there was a man-dible, which meant the rest of the body might be in the
ground.” He rushed to find a telephone in the nearby
homestead. “Happily, it worked! We were 100 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 ceremo-
niously buried; his hands were folded over the pelvis
and traces of red ocher enveloped him from crani-
um to loin. The ocher had been carried a great dis-T
ODAY THE SMITHSONIAN’S NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
(NMNH) cares for collections made by the American-Australian Sci-
entific Expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948. 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 Ab-
original bark paintings commissioned by the researchers sparked global
awareness of this art form. For decades the remains of over 40 Aboriginal
individuals were kept at NMNH. By 2010, 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. Returning the Arnhem Land remains to Australia, says Joshua A.
Bell, curator of globalization, “helped us establish more formal guidelines for
engaging in international repatriation.” –EMILY TOOMEYEPILOGUE FOR THE ANCESTORS
Smithsonian researchers forge a new policy for returning human
remains to indigenous people overseas