Life stories: Mungo Lady and Mungo Man

Abstract

Mungo Lady and Mungo Man lived in the region now known as the Willandra Lakes, western New South Wales, around 42,000 years ago during the late Pleistocene era. Scholars have deduced from their skeletal remains all that is known to science about their biographies. Mungo Lady, also known as Mungo Woman or by the scientific identifier ‘Willandra Lakes Hominid 1' (WLH 1), emerged, in fragments, from an eroding lunette on the downwind side of the now-dry Lake Mungo. She was found in July 1968 by Jim Bowler, a postgraduate student in geology at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, who was engaged on a geomorphological study of the series of 13 interconnected former lakes comprising the Willandra, on the traditional lands of the Paakantji, Ngyiampaa, and Mutthi Mutthi peoples. In February 1974 Bowler found Mungo Man (WLH 3) nearby. His discoveries caused great excitement within the scientific community and the public sphere, as they demonstrated that Australia’s human history spans tens of thousands of years, not a few thousand as previously believed.