A challenging idea about Human Evolution by Alan Thorne
Mungo Lady
Mungo Lady was delivered to Alan Thorne in a small cheap suitcase in 1968 when he was 28 years old. Her burned and shattered bones were embedded in six blocks of calcified sand. The field researchers who dug her up in a parched no-man's-land in southeastern Australia suspected that shewas tens of thousands of years old.
600 Bone Chips
Almost every day for the next six months, he painstakingly freed her remains from the sand with a dental drill, prizing out more than 600 bone chips, each no larger than a thumbnail. He washed them carefully with acetic acid, sealed them with a preservative, and pieced them together into a recognisable skeleton.
Looking closely at skull fragments, bits of arm bone, and a hint of pelvis, he became convinced that two things were true. First, the bones were human, Homo sapiens for sure, and they had held together a young woman. As he assembled this "monster three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle," Thorne, then a lecturer in the department of anatomy at the University of Sydney, began asking himself whose bones they might actually have been. He had no idea that many years later, the answer to that question would rock the world of anthropology.
Important and powerful
Something else about this woman became clear early on she had been important and powerful. The pattern of burn marks on her bones showed that after she died, her family burned the corpse, then smashed the bones. Later they added more fuel and burned the bones a second time. This was an unusual ritual. Ancient Aboriginal women were typically buried without fuss. Thorne wondered if her descendants had tried to ensure that she did not return to haunt them. As hours and days and months passed, he found himself thinking of her as a living, breathing person who'd spent her life encamped on the shores of Lake Mungo, in New South Wales. If this Mungo Lady turned out to be as ancient as field researchers thought, she would be the oldest human fossil ever found in Australia.
Skull bones as delicate as an emu's eggshell
In 1968 most anthropologists thought that they had a grip on human evolution. Big-browed, thick-skulled humanoids had descended from walking apes. These hulking creatures were eventually replaced by the more advanced, fine boned humans of our species Homo sapiens. Throughout Australia, anthropologists had found only big-browed, and thick-skulled fossils.
That made Mungo Lady a puzzle. Lab analysis of her remains suggested she was 25,000 years old, but her skull bones were as delicate as an emu's eggshell. Thorne began to realise that she might be telling him a different story than the one he'd read in textbooks. Was it possible that the delicate, fine-boned people had reached Australia before the big-brows?
In 1968 most anthropologists thought that they had a grip on human evolution. Big-browed, thick-skulled humanoids had descended from walking apes. These hulking creatures were eventually replaced by the more advanced, fine boned humans of our species Homo sapiens. Throughout Australia, anthropologists had found only big-browed, and thick-skulled fossils.
That made Mungo Lady a puzzle. Lab analysis of her remains suggested she was 25,000 years old, but her skull bones were as delicate as an emu's eggshell. Thorne began to realise that she might be telling him a different story than the one he'd read in textbooks. Was it possible that the delicate, fine-boned people had reached Australia before the big-brows?
Out of Africa
That was an exotic thought, and now, many years later, it is fuelling the debate within anthropology over a single huge question: Where did Homo sapiens come from? Most researchers accept a theory referred to as "Out of Africa." It holds that numerous species of hominids beginning with Homo erectus began migrating out of Africa almost 2 million years ago and evolved into several species. Then a new species called Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and migrated between 100,000 and120,000 years ago to Europe, Asia, and Australia, consigning all the earlier hominids it encountered to extinction.
