BELIEFS × PEOPLING

Lake Mungo: the Oldest Australian Burials

~40,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

At Lake Mungo, in Australia, a cremation and an ochre-strewn burial about 40,000 years old are among the oldest ritual treatments of the dead.

Lake Mungo, in western New South Wales, has stood dry for thousands of years, and the dune along its old shore erodes constantly, releasing what its sand had covered. Two graves came out of it: a body that had been burnt, the earliest cremation on record, and a man laid out and sprinkled with red ochre. Twenty-five optical ages, a method that measures how long buried quartz grains have been screened from daylight, place both burials at 40,000 years, give or take 2,000, and put people at the lake by 50,000 to 46,000 years ago. Sediment from inside the grave itself, set in resin and left in a cupboard for thirty years, was dated grain by grain in 2006 and returned 41,000 years, give or take 4,000.

Why it matters

Both known ways of treating the dead with ceremony appear at one place and, as far as the dating can tell, at one time: fire on one body, pigment on the other. Each implies a decision about what a corpse is owed, and the pairing is what makes the site unusual. The graves also put people beside a lake in the interior of the driest inhabited continent, while that lake was swinging between full and dry and heading for a long drought. And these are the ancestors of living communities: the cremated remains went back to the traditional owners of the country in 1992, and work at the lake has been carried on with them since.

Dating & uncertainty

Two chronologies have been published for the ochre burial. In 1999, a study combining electron spin resonance and uranium-series analyses gave 62,000 +/- 6,000 years, with the sediment holding the skeleton at 61,000 +/- 2,000, and concluded that the continent had been settled during or before the cold stage of 71,000 to 57,000 years ago. In 2003, twenty-five optical ages on the dune gave 40,000 +/- 2,000 for both burials, and a direct measurement on grave sediment gave 41,000 +/- 4,000 in 2006. The gap is no detail: at 62,000 years the burials would precede most of the evidence for the peopling of Australia, whereas at 40,000 they follow it.

Our species’ history as one day

20:57:083 h 3 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day