Mongoose Lady

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Mungo Lady (also known as Lake Mungo I ) is one of the oldest cremations , discovered in 1969 on Lake Mungo , New South Wales , Australia . The find suggests a complex burial ritual in early human history .

discovery

Mungo Lady was discovered by Jim Bowler, now a professor at the University of Melbourne . The skeleton was mainly reconstructed and described by Alan Thorne at the Australian National University . Mungo Lady was an early resident of the Australian continent. Their remains are among the oldest anatomically modern humans found in Australia. The pattern of the burn marks suggests an unusual ritual: after her death, the corpse was burned, smashed and then burned a second time. It is believed that their descendants wanted to make sure that they could not come back to visit them. She was around 19 years old when she died. The age of the Mungo Lady was initially determined by radiocarbon dating with various dates between 20,000 and 26,000 BP . The condition of the bones is poor, only about a quarter have been preserved. In 1974, 500 meters away, the skeleton of the approximately 1.96 meter tall Mungo Man was discovered. After weighing all the available data, it is currently assumed that both Mungo Man and Mungo Lady are around 40,000 years old.

state of things

The bones of Mungo I were unconditionally returned to the Aborigines (the Paakantji , Mathi Mathi and Ngiyampaa ) in 1992 . Mungo Lady has become a symbol of the long history of Aboriginal settlements in Australia and an important symbol for archaeologists and Aborigines. Mungo I is now in a safe at the Mungo National Park Exhibition Center. This safe has two locks and can only be opened with two keys. Archaeologists have one key, the other Aborigines.

literature

  • Lake Mungo I . In: Peter Brown's Australian & Asian Anthropology . Retrieved January 17, 2016.
  • Not Out of Africa . In: Bradshaw Foundation . Retrieved 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)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Derek John Mulvaney, Johan Kamminga Prehistory of Australia, page 161
  2. ↑ JM Bowler, H. Johnston, JM Olley, JR Prescott, RG Roberts, W. Shawcross, NA Spooner: New ages for human occupation and climatic change at Lake Mungo, Australia. Nature 421 (6925), 2003, pp. 837-840.
  3. ↑ JM Olley, RG Roberts, H. Yoshida, JM Bowler: Single-grain optical dating of grave-infill associated with human burials at Lake Mungo, Australia. Quaternary Science Reviews 25 (19-20), 2006, pp. 2469-2474.