Oldest known Australian hominin fossils to be reburied

March 20, 2025 • 9:40 am

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:

I link to the petition below.

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

18 thoughts on “Oldest known Australian hominin fossils to be reburied”

  1. [ sigh… ]

    I like how “reburied” sounds so… perfectly the reverse process of … however the fossil was … discovered? Or perhaps there’s a good technical term for it.

    IOW – IMHO – it will not do the fossil any good. But – let this not fuel a dialectic to never uncover fossils ever again.

  2. Once reinterred, those bones will deteriorate rapidly under the influence of water and exposure to air (yes, even under the ground if not buried deeply). They will be lost forever and, with the bones, any information that aboriginals might glean about their ancestry will be lost as well. They are destroying their own legacy.

    1. But their legacy is that their Creator placed them in Australia at the beginning of time, back when the Earth was still flat. They were living in harmony with Nature and with one another uninterruptedly until white devils showed up to murder them…and then started digging up bones that might show they were, and are, just ordinary people like everyone else who came out of Africa, nothing special. Notice how they got fussed about these old bones only when science advanced to where it was actually possible to examine claims of unique creation episodes.

      Seen this way, their actions are perfectly “understandable”, as our PM said about church burnings in the wake of our own aboriginal-inspired moral panics.

    2. This is what I mean.

      I read my other comment again again and want to make clear … I agree with PCC(E)’s post, and understand his use of “reburied” in its context.

  3. Petition signed. I think it’s imperative in countries where this sort of kowtowing to superstition currently holds sway that excavation work stops until sanity is restored. Otherwise archaeologists will just be revealing more material for the activists to seize and destroy — and the material in question is a very, very finite resource.

  4. I can only suggest a compromise of the compromise. There could be a burial, but the bones could be locked in a water-tight time capsule so that they may be recovered at a later time when people are more enlightened.

    1. NO! Mark my friend, damnit! NO compromise with the “spirit people” the “protectors” or “indigenous science is science” crowd nor “indigenous people were made in God’s image in the grounds of Australia or North America.” They weren’t.

      These people are inflicting their woo and religion on science and human progress MORE than Christian fundamentalism or even the Inquisition (the latter two halted whereas t his woo is in its ascendence).

      No compromise.
      You — me — NOBODY gets legal title over the remains of those who aren’t direct immediate relatives, people we loved personally and have photographs of.
      Or otherwise, as Elizabeth Weiss argues, the jurisdiction of “tribes” never ends. Californian claims now extend to…. Tunisian bones. (E. Weiss).

      No more magic, no more woo!

      This gathering steam scandal in Oz is the canary in the coal mine. And the border of “NO!”.

      respectfully Mark,

      D.A.
      NYC

  5. Thank you, Professor.

    Petition signed, of course – what good that will do, I have no idea. That said, yesterday – when I checked – the petion had 867 signatures. Now it has 1,150.

  6. As a sign of deep respect, the settler-colonialists should agree to remove all exhibits and references to the Australian First Peoples. Wipe them out of all settler-colonialist museums and books, studying them no more. Leave them in peace, alone, as they began, and as they apparently prefer.

    1. Yes, and as a sign of respect to my culture, I would prefer that they not make use of Western medicine or technlogy.

      1. Yes. Decolonisation is rather selective when deciding what will and will not be decolonised. On which side of the ledger is John Frum?

  7. I agree that it is very unfortunate that these fossils are being lost to science. But, on a slight tangent, I have often wondered how old a burial site has to be before it is fair game for archaeologists to dig up. If I went to find the grave of a great grandparent who I had never known, and discovered that sociologists had dug it up to study how people were buried in Hull in the 1950s, I imagine I wouldn’t be too happy. Although as I write this and think about it, perhaps it wouldn’t / shouldn’t bother me too much.

    1. I have a PhD in archaeology and have worked on many digs; as a prehistorian the most recent human remains I ever excavated were of a juvenile thrown into a midden (trash pit) in the Late Neolithic period in Greece – so roughly 6000 years BP. However, I know of many digs that study human remains of recent historical periods– say, a study of remains from late medieval cemetery which uses various methods of chemical analysis to determine diet or disease/cause of death or even movement of peoples from different areas. There seems to be less objection to these studies if the peoples in question were ‘Western’ even if fairly recent (Colonial US, for example). Another thing to consider is we obviously dig from top to bottom, so even if the objective of an excavation is to get to a Roman occupation level, for instance, one may be digging through much more recent levels first and there is always a chance to encounter human remains, not all of which end up in formal burials.

    2. The reason archaeologists don’t bother digging up people buried in Hull in the 1950s is because there is already ample documentary evidence on how people were buried then, their diet and diseases, indeed the names of people in individual burials. There is no worthwhile information that archaeology could add. But if there were, would I object? No, absolutely not, if some worthwhile information could be obtained. Even if it was a beloved grandparent. Because nothing we do now can injure them or cause them distress.

    3. The extensive excavations behind London’s Euston station in 2019 for the HS2 rail project revealed many thousands of Victorian era (and earlier) Londoners, the most famous of whom was Matthew Flinders, a navigator who first circumnavigated Australia – oddly enough in this context. The Digging for Britain television programme that covered the massive dig described the scientific investigations on the skeletal remains and that they would be reinterred elsewhere after those investigations finished.
      Digging up someone within the last hundred years I would think would have to have a very good reason for exhumation to convince the authorities that was necessary.

  8. All outrage or supposed ‘distress’ experienced in relation to any of these excavations is manufactured. One has to make a deliberate decision to become upset at something so abstract and impersonal.

    I’m not a geneticist, but even if one is a descendant of a long dead dug up ancestor, I imagine the genetic similarities with that ancestor are so weak as to be indistinguishable from anybody else’s. The ‘kinship’ or ‘heritage’ they claim is simply made up, and even if it wasn’t it has little relevance. It certainly should not be allowed to impede the discovery of knowledge by the 99.999% of the human population who don’t share their daft, censorious ideas.

    And if they are so sick and tired of fighting the evils of settler colonialism they should stop using computers, modern medicine, modern fabrics, electricity, spectacles, combustion engines, mobile phones, the modern latin/roman alphabet and the decimal number system. Not to mention Netflix, Amazon, Facebook Instagram and Snapchat.

    The needless meddling and hypocrisy of these people is absurd. I’m convinced they invent these problems just so they can exercise power over the evil white man. This stuff drives me round the bend.

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