Mungo Man

For a few hundred years, historians had a vague idea of how long First Nations people had lived in Australia. Estimations of a few thousand years were generally accepted, but then the discovery of one body, forever changed the way that we thought about Australian history. That body belonged to none other than Mungo Man.

I assume he had another name, but as we will never know his true name and because I love alliteration, today we will refer to him as Mungo Man.

Lake Mungo is located in New South Wales, and according to Google Maps it’s about an 11-hour drive West from Sydney, or 46 hours if you wanted to ride a bike, that would be sure to give you a serious case of bicycle face, but that is a story for another episode.

In 1974, a geologist, Dr Jim Bowler, discovered the bones of Mungo Man. This wasn’t the first time that he had found bones in this area. In fact, 6 years before, he had found some bones protruding from lunette- which is a kind of sand dune that has hardened into clay.

One year after finding the original bones, he decided to enlist the help of some professional archaeologists and they excavated the bones and tested them to determine that they belonged to a female who had been cremated.

The very fact that this was identified as a cremation was significant because it became the oldest known cremation in the world.

So, in 1974, after some particularly heavy rainfall, our afore mentioned geologist, Jim Bowler, was riding on his motorbike when he saw part of a white skull poking out from the soil. He had found another skeleton, but this time it was a male.  

How do you know the difference between a male and a female skeleton? Well usually, the main way archaeologists can tell is by the pelvis. Quite simply, a female pelvis must be wide enough to fit a baby’s head through during childbirth. If you are brave enough, do a Google image search and you will see a clear difference.

There are a few other factors such as skull shape and height that can be estimated from the length of the other bones, bone density and finger length. Unfortunately, due to deterioration, the skull and pelvis were not in great shape, after all the skeleton was more than 40 000 years old and scientists had to use post-cranial measurements to determine the sex.

FYI, post-cranial just means all the bones other than the skull. Mungo Man clocked in at about 170cm tall or 5 ft 6, and he was about 50 years old. I know that doesn’t seem too tall to be for a man in our modern society, but 40 000 year ago, people just simply didn’t get that tall, in fact, at 157cm, I probably would have been a giant lady.

Back to our motorbike riding 70s geologist, now that the bones had been discovered, the question was what to do with them?  

This is where we get into some moral and ethical questions about what to do with human remains that are dug up in archaeological excavations and this particular case creates a conundrum. The scientific carbon dating on these human remains was able to date Australian Aboriginal culture back more than 40 000 years at the time.  This was a hugely significant discovery.

There is a plethora of articles that refer to this scientific discovery as re-writing history. However, what I have found particularly difficult to find out in researching this episode is, exactly how old historians thought Aboriginal culture was before this point. And that is exactly why I love history, because the deeper you fall down the rabbit hole, the more mysteries there are to uncover.

My current hypothesis is that to historians and scientists, it possibly wasn’t even an area that was being studied in any great depth. To Australian academics, history would have meant Ancient Egypt and Ancient Rome, and not their own back yard.

Additionally, because in the 1960s, Aboriginal children were still being taken from their families by the government, and Aboriginal people were only just counted as citizens in the census and fighting the right to vote, the issue of equality was a much more pressing concern.

See how easy it is to fall into the information vortex! Back to the moral and ethical dilemmas. At the time there was some opposition by Aboriginal groups, not wanting scientists to take the bones away from their resting place and the bones were taken without the permission of the local elders. However, the discoveries from both Mungo Man and his distant relative Mungo Lady changed both the scientific and historical perspectives on the extent of Aboriginal culture in Australia.

 With this discovery, the door of Australian history was flung open to reveal one of the oldest continuing cultures on earth. So, wow! As the articles say, history was rewritten, and the academic field of Ancient Australian Aboriginal History was kickstarted.

The only problem was that after studying the bones, they were kept in a storeroom at the university, much to the distress of the traditional owners of the land. On the one hand, science had opened the window and allowed Aboriginal Australia to be recognised, but on the other hand, human remains were not being treated respectfully.

For a long time, archaeologists and anthropologists have a very dark history of looting and there are many stories of museums refusing to return stolen human remains and other artefacts to their rightful owners.

This story does have a resolution, in 2017 Mungo Man’s bones were returned to his decedents on his country in a ceremony -in other words repatriated. But because of erosion they were unable to be reburied. They are now kept safely back on country.

However, these were just one set of human bones that have been repatriated.

Mungo Man’s remains were discovered accidentally and have been able to go home, but there is a much darker side to the repatriation story.

Many of the bones of the First Peoples that are housed in museums, not generally on display, but in a storage room, are the spoils of the very gruesome and violent pastime of bone collecting and trade for the sake of anthropology. In order for early museums to acquire the bones, unscrupulous men would rob graves, some doctors would take bodies from mortuaries, prisons, hospitals and asylums; wherever they could get their hands-on human remains. Journalist Paul Daley wrote of the practice, he says “Their bodies were cut up for parts that became sought-after antiquities in colonial homesteads across Australia and in cultural, medical and educational institutions.”

I found a newspaper report on the Trove website from 1903 about a Dr Ramsay Smith who was suspended from his job and went on trial for his shocking corpse related crimes. The newspaper says, “the accusations deal with the alleged mutilations of dead bodies and clandestine exhumations.” I can’t even fathom the idea.

I remember in my early travels in the UK, and a travel guide was touting the eccentricities of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, they discussed the shrunken heads on display. I am ashamed to say, that I didn’t even think about the ethics of having human heads in a display case, or the stories behind how these remains came to be on display.

 I didn’t think about what might be hidden in the back rooms or who the remains might rightly belong to. To be honest I knew nothing about the atrocities of Australian history, I was taught in the era of “Three Cheers for Australia”. Needless to say, I have come a long way since then. In fact, it was on that very plane ride back home, I was reading a travelogue about Australia by an American author when I first read about the massacres that had been inflicted on the Aboriginal people and I started to think, I have some very real gaps in my education. But that a story for future episode.

One of the articles I read while researching, said that in the Indigenous Repatriation Program, more than 1200 of the remains that have been returned to country have come from the UK and I am sure there are many more in gruesome hidden stockpiles that have yet to be returned. But the positive news is that as of November 2019 more than 1600 Aboriginal ancestors have come home.

This is Kelly Chase on the case.