Mungo Lady
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The Mungo Lady (also known as Mungo I) is one of the world's oldest cremations discovered at Lake Mungo, New South Wales, Australia in 1969. The finding implies complicated burial ritual in the early human societies.
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[edit] Discovery
The Mungo Lady (also known as Mungo I) one of the world's oldest cremations discovered at Lake Mungo, New South Wales in 1969 by Professor Jim Bowler with the University of Melbourne. The reconstruction and description were mainly done by Alan Thorne at the Australian National University. The Mungo Lady was an early human inhabitant of the continent of Australia. Her remains are one of the oldest anatomically modern human remains found in Australia. The pattern of burn marks on the bones of Mungo I implies an unusual ritual that after she died, the corpse was burned, smashed, then burned a second time. It was suspected that her descendants had tried to ensure that she did not return to haunt them. Mungo I has been 14C dated as 26,000 to 20,000 years ago. Preservation of the remain is poor.
[edit] Mungo Man
In 1974, the skeleton of the 40,000-year-ago Mungo Man (Mungo III) was discovered only 1,600 feet from where Mungo Lady had been found. The controversial analysis of Mungo Man's has led some researchers to challenge the single-origin hypothesis.
[edit] Current status
The bones were unconditionally repatriated to the Aborigines (the Paakantji, the Mathi Mathi, and the Ngiyampaa) in 1992. Mungo Lady had become a symbol of the long Aboriginal occupation in Australia, and an important icon for both archaeologists and Aborigines. Mungo I is now in a locked vault at the Mungo National Park exhibition center. The vault has a double lock and can only be opened if two keys are used. One key is controlled by archaeologists, the other by Aborigines.
[edit] References
- Lake Mungo I. University of New England. Retrieved on March 30, 2006.
- Not Out of Africa. Bradshaw Foundation. Retrieved on March 30, 2006.
- Anne-Marie, Cantwell, "Who Knows the Power of His Bones": Reburial Redux, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2000).
- General Anthropology Bulletin of the General Anthropology Division Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 1-15, (2003)
