Fifty years after his discovery of the ancient “Mungo Man” significantly improved understanding of the tens of thousands of years that modern humans inhabited Australia, Jim Bowler returned to the dry lake where this momentous encounter took place.
That day – 26 February 1974 – would change scientific understanding of humanity’s antiquity and prove something Australian Indigenous people had always known: They had been here forever, or in the case of Mungo Man and Mungo Lady – also found by Bowler in 2010. 1968 – 42,000 years and counting.
Bowler, 94, along with his family and representatives of three well-known traditional owners, Barkandji/Paackantji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa, felt it was “essential” to be in the Willandra Lakes region last Monday after 50 years. He wanted to be among them, especially some of the elders, to think about all that Mungo Man had conveyed and what he might now inspire for the future of racial reconciliation in Australia.
Bowler was a young and adventurous man when he came across the bones of the Mungo Lady and later the Mungo Man. The father of six operated alone, wandering the Willandra Lakes for weeks, investigating rock formations and encountering ancient traces of human life in the region, which is a vast inland sea.
Bowler’s main professional interests were the geological evidence of climate change and the “ice age story”. However, especially after finding the bones of the Lady Mungo, he was aware that “much more remains to be told” about the antiquity of humankind on the Australian continent. His discoveries will contribute as much or more to the body of knowledge about evolutionary biology than climate change and the ice age.
Perhaps it is not surprising that he so vividly remembers the sunny, cool summer morning when he came across the full skeleton of the Mungo Man, who, like the dismembered remains of the Mungo Lady, had been subjected to complex funeral rites involving ocher and fire.
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“When it stopped raining, there was an opportunity to go outside and investigate because the rain always released new air.” [archaeological material],” he says. “I was always… very aware of the importance of Ms. Mungo. [But] their remains were quite fragmented – they had been burned and were already lying in the open – so there was no real understanding of the environment [at time of burial] … but I always had it in the back of my mind that there was more evidence of humans, and you keep looking.”
“There were so many rich signs of human habitation… fish remains, stone tools, middens; it was a gold mine for a geologist. When I noticed the white piece of bone, at first I thought it was a wombat… but I went and took a short look.” I looked at it and it was quite different and I brushed away some of the sand and exposed some of the jawbone, teeth and jaw, so this was clearly a human.
“I had no idea whether the skull meant the whole body was there, but it was enough to raise the possibility that we had evidence of another ancient human here deep within the dune.”
Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century, physical anthropologists and anatomists attempted to prove, through widespread theft and collecting of human skulls, that Australian Aboriginal people represented a step in the evolutionary chain between apes and modern humans. Although this theory has already been debunked, some researchers were still looking for traces of Neanderthals and Homo erectus in the remains of Aboriginal people stolen from traditional burial sites; but none were as old as Mungo Man and Lady, inhabitants of the last ice age.
“I realized this is the beginning of a new day [of knowledge]” says Bowler.
Within 48 hours, friends from the Australian National University, particularly John Mulvaney, Bowler’s mentor and known as the father of Australian archaeology, arrived to excavate the bones.
“So we were sweeping through the sand cover, and very quickly we saw this extraordinary testimony to human antiquity emerging before our eyes, deep within the core of the ancient dune.”
Bowler admits today that events are “exciting” and that he has inspired “a sense of elation” among academics that he is the last survivor. But hindsight suggests that such happiness and academic pride, when dealing with the elimination of ancestral remains, could be “dangerous” no matter what scientific knowledge they might advance or myths be debunked.
The removal of bones—or their theft, as some Native people say—was not widely controversial at the time; This followed a long Australian tradition of cultural theft of ancestral remains, particularly by Murray Black, who provided hundreds of skeletons. and the skulls were sent to the Australian Institute of Anatomy. Bowler, a much younger man in Gippsland, knew this and was appalled by Black.
Asked whether removing the Mungo remains was “heresy or sacrilege”, Bowler said “at that moment, no”.
“Unfortunately at that stage there was no known presence of indigenous people [as local custodians] – there is no one or person we can consult, let alone share the importance of that event. [from whom to] request removal [of the remains],” says.
“Science was studying the shameful treatment of Indigenous remains. This feeling of disrespect had not yet emerged… At that time… there was no conscious reflection of shame. But this is now seen as a gross misrepresentation of what we should be doing… We would treat these remains very differently today.”
Contact with traditional owners, led in part by the deceased Mutthi Mutthi elder Alice Kelly, did not occur for several years, by which time Mungo Man and Lady were secured at the ANU.
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Although scientific testing of the remains had been exhausted and Mungo national park had been declared a Unesco world heritage site partly due to its unique global human connection, there was deep-rooted institutional opposition to Mungo Man’s return to the country. Along with traditional owners, Bowler and Mulvaney took action to have the remains brought home and buried respectfully. Mungo Man was brought back to the country in 2017 after Mungo Lady was repatriated in 1992. Both were held in a secure facility linked to Mungo national park.
The secret reburial of the bodies in 2022 stunned some traditional guardian elders. The reburial was put forward by an Aboriginal advisory group made up of members of three traditional owner groups that advise the New South Wales bureaucracy on traditional land management in the Willandra Lakes region. . Some members of the advisory group opposed the reburial.
Reburial led to divisiveness in local Aboriginal communities. Some wanted a more monumental funeral, others a memorial service. Alice Kelly’s grandson Jason Kelly is still angry about the secret reburial he tried to stop.
“This is against the wishes of my grandmother, who does not want them to be secretly buried in the ground – but [into] a respectful and safe storage place.
Kelly and his father Danny Kelly (Alice’s only living child) and his uncle Ngiyampaa elder Roy Kennedy, now in his 90s, were among the traditional owners who joined Bowler and his family on the shores of Lake Mungo this week.
Bowler and several elders were hoping to visit the reburial site. However, the advisory group rejected the proposal.
“It meant a lot to them to be able to be there with Jim,” Kelly says. “It was great to be there but disappointing that the seniors couldn’t go to the main event. [secret] reburial area. “It was disappointing to my father and Uncle Roy that the whole country didn’t realize that this was the 50th anniversary and what Mungo Man meant to the country and the world.”
While Bowler said he felt the need to be close to where he discovered Mungo Man, the day was also filled with disappointment that he could not go to the site where he was reburied and that the oldest Indigenous Australians discovered had been buried without ceremony.
“They didn’t deserve to be buried secretly without dignity,” says Bowler. “Unlike the ritual ceremony that took place there 40,000 years ago, secret reburial remains a sad moment. Even though it’s not something we want to focus on. Time has passed. Some mistakes were made; We’ve all made mistakes. Now we have to move on to the next stage.”
This step, he says, should be a year-long reconciliation dialogue “to find the healing glue” following the defeat of last October’s constitutional recognition referendum.
“Healing is needed; The need for dialogue between different cultures has not been resolved. With the failure of the referendum, there was an urgent need to search for a healing adhesive. What can now unite the nation? “I would argue that this is an example of the Mungo people and their deep connection to the land and the spiritual dimension that embraces them as the people most closely connected to the cosmos.”
Kelly agrees.
“The suggestion of a dialogue around Mungo is very appropriate. My grandmother always promoted it as a place of healing. And as a place of learning for all Australians…we have never come close to realizing Mungo’s potential as a place of global, cultural, spiritual and humanitarian significance.”
Bowler, 94, may yet return to Lake Mungo. But no matter what, the conversation his discovery started 50 years ago promises to continue, even as it results in human significance and pain.