Oldest known Australian hominin fossils to be reburied

Once again we have a conflict between science and the unevidenced claims of superstition. This time it’s from Australia.

Some of the “Willandra lakes fossils” from New South Wales, which include the famous “Lake Mungo remains” (three sets of hominin fossils that are the oldest ones known from Australia), have been or are scheduled to be reburied without further study. You can guess why: the indigenous people claim that these are their ancestors, giving them, so they say, moral rights to do what they want with all ancient bones that are found. I first learned about it from the two tweets below, but had a lot of trouble finding any news. I suspect that the news has been suppressed by the media because any intimation that these fossils derived from ancestors in other places is abhorrent, violating their superstitions. As the Australian National Museum notes:

From an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander view of creation, people have always been in Australia since the land was created.

On mainland Australia, the Dreaming is a system of belief held by many first Australians to account for their origins. In the Dreaming all-powerful beings roamed the landscape and laid the moral and physical groundwork for human society.

Prior to the Dreaming there was a ‘land before time’ when the earth was flat. Ancestral beings moulded the landscape through their actions and gave life to the first people and their culture. No one can say exactly how old the Dreaming is. From an Indigenous perspective the Dreaming has existed from the beginning of time.

And that led to the situation that I saw in these two tweets:

The Willandra Lakes fossils made the region a World Heritage Site

But now our evolutionary heritage is being reburied by the government, against the protests of UNESCO, archaeologists and some Aboriginal groups

Please sign the petition to stop this destruction (link below) https://t.co/6D3DNEqL2k pic.twitter.com/TgOEqoj0Zp

— Mungo Manic (@MungoManic) March 2, 2025

I link to the petition below.

This week, one of the most important fossils ever found in Australia (and perhaps the world) was taken to an undisclosed location, put in a hole and covered with dirt

WLH-50, the Garnpung Giant pic.twitter.com/ikot0CMzLd

— Mungo Manic (@MungoManic) March 18, 2025

You can read about the Garnpung Giant, WLH-50, here, on a site by Peter Brown. (The fossil is called “Giant” because its head is unusually large). It hasn’t been studied much, but has already been reburied to satisfy the wishes of indigenous people. I truly wonder why many of the aboriginals (not all of them) prefer these fossils to be buried rather than studied, but, as I said, scientific study might show these fossils to themselves have been from “settler colonialists”!

Willandra Lakes Hominid 50 was recovered from a deflating land surface in the Garnpung/Leaghur Lake region of south-western New South Wales, with the first published report in Flood (1983). This skeleton has not been reliably dated, has not been formally described, and is probably pathological. These circumstances result in some unease over the extreme claims made about the relevance of WLH 50 to interpretations of the Australasian evolutionary sequence (Stringer 1992; Brown 1992; Stringer and Bräuer 1994). In particular WLH 50 regularly appears as a corner stone in arguments for evolutionary continuity between the Indonesian and Australian regions published over the last two decades (Thorne 1984; Wolpoff 1992, 1995; Thorne and Wolpoff 1992; Frayer et al. 1993; Frayer et al. 1994; Hawks et al. 2000) which is an unusual circumstance for an undescribed and poorly provenanced fossil.

Attempts to date WLH 50 have obtained controversial results. Initial attempts to obtain a radiocarbon date achieved a result much younger than expected. It is possible that the specimen was contaminated and material other than collagen was dated. It is also possible that the fossil is a lot younger than some people would like.

WLH 50 consists of a fragmentary cranial vault, with damage to the basal and temporal segments, some facial fragments, parts of an elbow joint and some smaller postcranial pieces. The most striking feature of the cranial vault, malar fragments and elbow is of great size. Although glabella is not preserved, maximum cranial length can be estimated (±3 mm) to 212 mm, with a maximum cranial breadth of 151 mm and maximum supraorbital breadth greater than 131 mm. These dimensions exceed the recorded Aboriginal range of variation (Brown 1989). Even with the pathologically thickened vault, discussed below, endocranial volume was approximately 1540 ml compared with the Holocene Aboriginal male mean of 1271 ml Brown (1992b) . The extremely large size of WLH 50 should be of some concern to those who argue that this skeleton is in some manner representative of ‘Late Pleistocene’ Australians (Thorne 1984; Wolpoff 1992, 1995; Thorne and Wolpoff 1992; Frayer et al. 1993; Frayer et al. 1994).

There’s more at the site linked above, but the large cranial vault made it especially imperative to study this specimen. Sadly, it’s now deteriorating below ground, thanks to the demands of the indigenous people.

As Wikipedia notes, this region has harbored humans for the last 40,000 years, some of the oldest H. sapiens fossils known. (Remember, the humans who populated the world left Africa roughly 70,000 years ago, and colonized Australia only 5,000 years after that). That makes these fossils especially important for scientific study.  But when they’re reburied, as all three of the major Lake Mungo fossils have been, no further study is possible, and the bones will be destroyed. And look at this:

In 1989, the skeleton of a child believed to be contemporary with Mungo man was discovered. Investigation of the remains was blocked by the 3TTG with the remains subsequently protected but remaining in-situ. An adult skeleton was exposed by erosion in 2005 but by late 2006 had been completely destroyed by wind and rain. This loss resulted in the Indigenous custodians’ receiving a government grant of $735,000 to survey and improve the conservation of skeletons, hearths and middens that were eroding from the dunes. Conservation is in-situ and no research is permitted.

At any rate, two readers managed to find two article on this from the ABC. The first one is from 2022, but the second is from this week, showing that the dispute is ongoing.

From 2022 (click to read):

An excerpt:

First Nations people with direct links to Australia’s oldest human remains say they should have the ultimate voting rights to re-inter the skeleton, not the federal Environment Minister.

The Willandra Lake Region, near Ivanhoe in the far Central West, is home to Mungo Man’s 42,000-year-old remains, the oldest in Australia and first recorded evidence of a ceremonial burying.

In 1974, Mungo Man’s body was removed from the ancient burial site, along with more than 100 other Aboriginal graves.

In 2017, the body was returned to the region but has remained in the Lake Mungo visitor centre.

JAC: It’s not there any more: Mungo Man and Mungo Lady were reburied about a week after the article above appeared. Researchers and elders tried to work out some compromise under which the bones would be “reburied” (presumably put in a facility below ground) while still accessible to scientists. But it failed. More:

According to the National Native Title Tribunal, the majority of Lake Mungo falls within the Paakantyi people’s land.

Paakantyi man Michael Young said Ms Ley having the final say was an example of settler colonialism.

“We have had that for 234 years and we are really over that side of it,” he said.

“We want our people re-established in those areas so they can determine what is best for their country and their people.”

I am not moved by the “settler-colonialism” argument. No living indigenous people know whether these remains are ancestral. The people represented by known Mungo fossils might not have reproduced, or might have left no living descendants if they did.  Their relationship to living First Nations people is unknown, and it’s a loss to science to cater to these unevidenced claims. Sure, there can be displays with casts and appreciation for the history of ancient humans that came to Australia, but what a loss to science to rebury some of the oldest H. sapiens remains known from out of Africa!

The article below (click to read) came out two days ago on the ABC:

Excerpt:

The discovery of Mungo Man and Mungo Lady, some of the most significant remains ever found in Australia, helped to re-write the history of this country and its First Peoples.

But how they, and the 106 other remains found with them, should be laid to rest has led to decades of division, secret burials and two federal court cases.

The reburial of the final skeletal remains into undisturbed and unmarked grave sites — overseen by a group of elders — is currently underway.

But some traditional owners hope a last-ditch federal court case will stop the reburials and allow a public “keeping place” to preserve the remains for further scientific study.

. . . Mungo Man is the oldest skeleton ever found in Australia at approximately 42 thousand years old — older than the pyramids in Egypt — and some of the earliest human remains discovered anywhere in the world.

This finding confirmed how long First Nations people have lived on this continent and revealed new details about how they lived at the time.

Over the 1960s and 1970s, 106 other Indigenous skeletons were removed from the same region and taken to Canberra.

The information gathered at the site led to the region being listed on the World Heritage Register in 1981, one of the first in Australia.

But the removal of the bones without their consent angered traditional owners of the three groups in the area, the Mutthi Mutthi, Paakantji (Barkindji) and Ngiyampaa people.

This sounds like a good compromise, and even some tribal elders agree with that suggestion:

Wamba Wamba and Mutthi Mutthi man Jason Kelly and other community members have long believed the remains should go to a ‘keeping place’ that would remain accessible to both scientists and descendants, as was requested by his elders.

But even the elders don’t have authority here!

But members of the Willandra Lakes Region Aboriginal Advisory Group (AAG), an advisory group of community-elected representatives of the three traditional owner groups, want the remains reburied in a secret location with a traditional ceremony so they could finally be at peace.

“A keeping place is no good for our ancestors,” Barkindji man and AAG member Ivan Johnson told ABC Mildura.

“Our ancestors were buried in the ground, and we should put them back in the ground and leave them there to rest.”

Rest? Being at peace at last? They aren’t resting, they are DEAD and only their bones remain, bones that can give us clues to human migration and evolution. What about the Garnpung Giant? Could it possibly be a specimen of Homo erectus (thought to have gone extinct about 110,000 years ago)? We won’t know.

And of course the scientists object, though there are some who have been cowed by the Authority of the Sacred Victims. Read the article to learn more. .

As the reburials proceed, so too does a federal court application brought by Jason Kelly seeking to force Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to bring them to a halt.

He also wants the locations of the burial sites to be recorded and have burial mounds erected so descendants and the public can pay their respects.

A decision is expected to be handed down within the next week.

You can sign a petition about it having the fossils accessible in a “keeping place” here (though it won’t do much good, I suspect). Not many people have signed the petition (just over a thousand); imagine if every subscriber here signed it!  I find it unconscionable that false legands and dubious claims about ancestry impede science in this way. A “keeping place” can both respect the wishes of the indigenous people and at the same time allow scientists to study the remains.

Here’s a video from The Australian in which the anthropologist who apparently discovered Mungo Man and Mungo Lady argues for a keeping place that will allow study of the fossils.  He notes that in 20 years there will surely be new methods for studying fossils like this, making their preservation especially important.

h/t: Cate, Al