Fifty Years Ago, the True Level of the Epic Story of Aboriginal Australians’ was Revealed at the Lake Mungo

The 40,000 years old “Mungo Lady” with the equally prehistoric remains of the Mungo Man, discovered close by in 1974, twofold scientific estimation about how long the Aboriginal people had been called the Australia home.

The finding taught us the Aboriginal history extended back to the time when their only humans in the Europe were the Neanderthals, and the people have not yet reached the Americas. The cultural, political and the scientific, reverberations still resonated until now. 

Lake Mungo has been an icon, not just to Australians, but into the larger world. The dunes border line the dried-out shore contains the continent’s matured known human remaining, and some of those earliest archaeological tracks of Aboriginal people.

The remarkable combination of the environmental and cultural heritage altered the national conversation about the deep link to the country of the Aboriginal people. It makes sure the Lake Mungo and some other relict lakes within the Willandra area were inscribed on the World Heritage list of UNESCO in 1981.

The landmark discovery of Bowler also instigated the latest approach to investigate: the joining together of the archaeologists, traditional owners and environmental scientists to illuminate an epic story of the natural and human history of Australia.

Lost Worlds

We need to go back to some 130,000 years past to set the scene for this action-packed, epic story. The story starts during the final interglacial era and encompassed the succeeding ice age, that lasted until around 20,000 years ago. This traverses the resulting eight millennia of the warming temperatures and also the rising sea levels, since the planet come in the current interglacial time about 12,000 years past.

During the final interglacial (130,000-120,000 years past), the sea levels can have been some few meters higher than now and the reptiles and birds, giant marsupials, the “megafauna” – wandered in the continent. The super-sized kangaroos that weigh 230 kg foraged crossways the landscape, together with the 3-tonne relations of wombats, giant flightless birds and the koalas. These creatures became the meals for the carnivorous marsupial “lion”, the Thylacoleo the huge venomous lizard, the Megalania.

The swollen rivers guided monsoonal rains from a tropical north into the central Australia. The Kati Thanda or the Lake Eyre has been 25 meters deep and shaped part of the vast inland body of water with the volume equal to 700 Sydney Harbors. After 80 millennia, the ill-fated European travelers would look in vain for the long-departed “inland sea”.

In between 120,000-20,000 years past, as Antarctica and some parts of Northern Hemisphere became covered in ice and sea levels near Australia fell from high to 125 meters. Northern Australia was connected by the land bridge to the present-day of eastern Indonesia, southern New Guinea and the public and animals would, at times, walking from the mainland to Tasmania. The subsequent mega-continent of the “Sahul” was 43% bigger than the current-day Australia.

About 70,000 years past, the modern humans, the Homo sapiens, started moving to Southeast Asia. There they can have encountered, interbred or exterminated with the present groups of the archaic humans, like the Homo floresiensis (“hobbit” of Flores), Homo erectus, and probably the Denisovans – the enigmatic group connected to Neanderthals.

Ancient Mariners

Making that jump across Wallace Line – this biogeographical border that separates an Asian continental shelf coming from the eastern Indonesian island, an area called as Wallacea to Sahul would need to require some voyages across the open water, even during the times of lower sea level.

Between the islands visibility can have encouraged the island-hopping through the southern or northern route into Sahul, and with the submerged islands off now the coast of the northwest Australia recognized as the likely place for the initial landfall. Probably these pioneering mariners had been helped by the favorable wind and the ocean currents.

From the Aboriginal perspective, the people had always been within Australia, while the scientific evidence of the human presence extended rear as far as the 65,000 years, to the time when the Earth was heading deeper into the final ice age. The trailblazers utilized the advanced stone tool tech and pigments, bone ornaments plus the burial rituals, like the cremation and the application of the ochre to the 40,000 years old remaining of the Mungo Man and the Mungo Lady.

The rate in which people spreading across the wide brown land appeared to have been notably rapid, both across the deserts and around the coasts, off the Western part of the Australian coast, Barrow Island, and Flinders Ranges, in the South Australia, were engaged by 50,000 years past, with the whole continent settled right after.

Many of those details of the Australia’s distant past had been the subject of the ongoing debate and also researches, not least above the nature of dealings of people with native flora and fauna. But the large body of proof suggested human hunters have the hand in extinguishing a megafauna, probably after some millennia of coexistence.

A Big Chill

With this descending in the grip of that final ice age of the world, deteriorating climate possibly also played the role in a megafauna’s demise, with the drying lakes adding the pressure on the already stressed populace. Australia’s inland lakes had never recovered into the former glory, not only during the present interglacial.

During the ice age peak (about 30,000-20,000 years past), central Australia has been drier and some degrees colder than what is being experienced now. The shifting sand dunes expanding over much of an arid interior, while the ice caps are growing and the glaciers advanced in Tasmanian highlands and also in Snowy Mountains on mainland.

New Horizons

The broad brushstrokes of the give only glimpse at the rich tale Indigenous people of Australia and with their cultural heritage as well. Continent-wide narratives with concealed important details also of how the climate and biodiversity of Australia have altered through changed through the 130,000 years past, ignoring lots of the contrasting sights on how the era unfolded. For more ancient stories you can visit here.