MessageToEagle.com – Who were the first inhabitants in Australia? When Homo sapiens arrived in Australia, they were, for the first time, truly alone, surrounded by wildly different flora and fauna, but who were these people? There is a close cultural and genetic link between the First Australians and modern-day Aborigines.
Researchers have now found compelling evidence suggesting that Aboriginal people were the first to inhabit Australia. The work refutes an earlier landmark study that claimed to recover DNA sequences from the oldest known Australian, Mungo Man.
Who Was The Mungo Man?
In 1969, on the shores of the ancient and now dry Lake Mungo, Australian archaeologists discovered the remains of the oldest known human to have been ritually cremated. They found bone fragments belonging to the skeleton of a young woman, who became known as Mungo Lady or LM1. She is now believed to have lived and died some 40,000 years ago.
Five years later, in close proximity to Mungo Lady, shifting sand dunes exposed the remains of a Mungo Man or LM3. It is estimated that this male was buried about 42,000 years ago. Mungo Man is the oldest skeleton buried using red ochre, a material which could only have reached the shores of Lake Mungo by trade. This is the earliest known example of such a sophistocated and artistic burial practice.
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The Mungo Man was special in many ways. He was clearly important enough for his passing to be marked with a ritual ceremony. His body was carefully placed in the grave – legs bent, facing upwards, hands over the groin. It was then covered with ochre, a natural pigment brought in from at least 60 miles away. This is some of the earliest evidence of spirituality anywhere in the world.
Examination of the Mungo Man was interpreted as evidence that Aboriginal people were not the first Australians, and that Mungo Man represented an extinct lineage of modern humans that occupied the continent before Aboriginal Australians.
Aboriginal Australians Came Before The Mungo Man
Now a group of scientists from Griffith University’s Research Centre for Human Evolution (RCHE) used new DNA sequencing methods to re-analyse the remains of Mungo Man from the World Heritage listed landscape of the Willandra Lakes region, in far western New South Wales.
Professor Lambert, from RCHE, said it was clear that incorrect conclusions had been drawn in relation to Mungo Man in the original study.
“The sample from Mungo Man which we retested contained sequences from five different European people suggesting that these all represent contamination,” he said.
Credit: © markrhiggins / Fotolia
“At the same time we re-analysed more than 20 of the other ancient people from Willandra. We were successful in recovering the genomic sequence of one of the early inhabitants of Lake Mungo, a man buried very close to the location where Mungo Man was originally interred.
“By going back and reanalysing the samples with more advanced technology, we have found compelling support for the argument that Aboriginal Australians were the first inhabitants of Australia.”
Professor Lambert explained that the results proved that the more advanced genomic technology was capable of unlocking further secrets from Australia’s human past.
“We now know that meaningful genetic information can be recovered from ancient Aboriginal Australian remains,” he said.
“This represents the first time researchers have recovered an ancient mitochondrial genome sequence from an Aboriginal person who lived before the arrival of the Europeans.”
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