Lake Mungo: Mungo Lady, Mungo Man and Australia's Oldest Burials

Lake Mungo is a dry lake bed in south-western New South Wales, Australia, where two of the most important human burials in the world were found: Mungo Lady in 1968 and Mungo Man in 1974. Dated to roughly 40,000 years ago, they are among the oldest human remains known from Australia, and Mungo Lady is the oldest known cremation anywhere. Their discovery transformed understanding of the deep history of Aboriginal Australians, and their return to their custodians became a landmark in the repatriation of ancestral remains.

A landscape of ancient lakes

Lake Mungo is one of a chain of lake basins in the Willandra Lakes Region, fed during the last Ice Age by water flowing along Willandra Creek from the Lachlan River system. During wetter periods the lakes were full of fish, shellfish and waterbirds, and people camped along their shores. As the climate became drier towards the height of the last glaciation, the lakes shrank and eventually dried out.

Winds blowing across the lakes built crescent-shaped dunes called lunettes along their eastern shores. The lunette at Lake Mungo stretches for some 30 kilometres and has been sculpted by erosion into pale cliffs and gullies known as the Walls of China. That erosion continually exposes ancient hearths, stone tools, shell middens and burials buried within the dune layers.

The area is the traditional country of three Aboriginal groups, the Paakantyi (also spelled Barkindji), Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa peoples. The Willandra Lakes Region was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1981, for both its natural and cultural values, and Lake Mungo lies within Mungo National Park.

Mungo Lady: the oldest known cremation

In July 1968 the geologist Jim Bowler, of the Australian National University, was studying the lunette to reconstruct past climates when he noticed burnt bone eroding from the sand. Archaeologists who excavated the find in 1969 found the remains of a young adult woman, catalogued as Mungo 1 and known as Mungo Lady.

Her body had been cremated, the burnt bones then deliberately smashed, and the fragments burned again before being placed in a small pit. This sequence of treatment shows a deliberate and elaborate funeral rite. No older cremation is known anywhere in the world, which makes Mungo Lady significant far beyond Australia.

Mungo Man: an ochre burial

On 26 February 1974 Bowler found another skeleton exposed by erosion about 500 metres from the Mungo Lady site. This was an adult man, catalogued as Mungo 3 and known as Mungo Man, buried lying on his back with his hands crossed over his lap. His body had been sprinkled with red ochre, a pigment that in this region had to be brought from some distance away.

The ochre burial is among the earliest known examples of this practice in the world. Together, the two burials show that people living at Lake Mungo performed careful and varied funeral rites with deep symbolic meaning. Mungo Man appears to have suffered from arthritis, and his teeth were heavily worn, suggesting a life of hard use.

Dating the burials

Working out the age of the burials took decades and caused considerable debate. Early radiocarbon dates suggested Mungo Lady was about 25,000 to 26,000 years old and Mungo Man around 28,000 to 30,000 years old. In 1999 a study using other methods proposed an age of about 62,000 years for Mungo Man, which would have made him far older and caused a stir.

In 2003 a team led by Bowler published a detailed reassessment in the journal Nature, combining optically stimulated luminescence dating of the sediments with careful mapping of the dune layers. It concluded that both burials were about 40,000 years old, plus or minus about 2,000 years. This figure, roughly 40,000 to 42,000 years ago, is now widely accepted. Other evidence in the region, including stone tools, shows people were living around the Willandra Lakes from at least about 45,000 to 50,000 years ago.

Claims in 2001 to have recovered ancient mitochondrial DNA from Mungo Man drew wide attention, but a later re-analysis published in 2016 found that the earlier sequences were most likely the result of modern contamination. Reliable ancient DNA from the Mungo burials has not been reported.

Return to the custodians

From the start, the excavation and removal of the remains troubled local Aboriginal communities, who had not been consulted. Over the following decades their elders campaigned for the ancestors to be returned. Mungo Lady was handed back to the traditional owners in 1992 and placed in a locked safe at Lake Mungo, under the joint control of the custodians and the scientists.

Mungo Man was returned in November 2017. His remains were taken from Canberra in a hearse and travelled by road across New South Wales to Lake Mungo, accompanied by elders and family groups and greeted by ceremonies along the way. More than 100 other ancestral remains taken from the region were returned at the same time. The communities continue to discuss how and where the ancestors should finally rest.

Jim Bowler himself came to support the return of Mungo Man to his country. The repatriation is often cited as an example of how scientists and Aboriginal communities can work towards reconciliation over the treatment of ancestral remains.

Other discoveries in the Willandra

The Willandra Lakes have produced much more than the two famous burials. Archaeologists have recorded fireplaces, stone tools, grinding stones, and remains of fish, shellfish, emu eggs and small marsupials eaten by people over many thousands of years. In 2003 hundreds of human footprints, made in soft clay roughly 19,000 to 23,000 years ago, were found near Lake Mungo. They record adults and children walking and possibly running across a damp lake margin.

The region also preserves evidence of the extinct giant animals of Ice Age Australia, such as Diprotodon, allowing researchers to study how people and megafauna overlapped.

Shifting ideas about Australia’s past

When Mungo Lady was found in 1968, many people still assumed that Aboriginal Australians had arrived on the continent relatively recently. The Lake Mungo finds, together with other discoveries of the 1960s and 1970s, pushed the human story in Australia back tens of thousands of years. They showed that Aboriginal people had lived through dramatic changes in climate, including the drying of inland lakes, and had adapted to them.

The finds also helped change public attitudes. The Mungo burials became widely known in Australia and abroad, and they are frequently cited as evidence of one of the oldest continuous cultures in the world.

Timeline

• c. 50,000–45,000 years ago: People are living around the Willandra Lakes (estimated range).
• c. 42,000–40,000 years ago: Mungo Lady is cremated and Mungo Man is buried with red ochre.
• c. 23,000–19,000 years ago: Human footprints are left in clay near Lake Mungo.
• 1968, July: Jim Bowler finds the cremated remains of Mungo Lady.
• 1974, 26 February: Bowler finds the burial of Mungo Man.
• 1981: The Willandra Lakes Region is added to the World Heritage List.
• 1992: Mungo Lady is returned to her Aboriginal custodians.
• 2003: A study in Nature dates both burials to about 40,000 years ago.
• 2017, November: Mungo Man is returned to Lake Mungo.

Why it matters

Lake Mungo shows that Aboriginal Australians have lived on the continent for well over 40,000 years and had sophisticated funeral rites at a time when much of the world’s human history is barely known. It complements other early sites such as Madjedbebe in reconstructing the first peopling of Australia. The return of Mungo Lady and Mungo Man also marks a shift towards respecting the rights of Aboriginal communities over their ancestors.