The Mungo man was found in the deep interior of the Australian outback
in the Willandra Lakes region. This is a harsh environment and thus
the first settlers of Australia would have had little ability to conquer
such harsh climates. The first settlers came from Indonesia and thus
were accustomed to tropical climates. The NW portion of Australia is
similar in ecology to Indonesia and thus was an inviting home for the
new comers. But to conquer the desert required an entire re-tooling of
culture and the technological equipment of these newcomers. This would
have required some time. Mungo man is found about 2000 miles from the
entry point and that also requires time for the population to travel
that distance.
Because Australia can not be seen from Timor, Indonesia, the closest
island to Australia, these dating results imply that mankind sailed out
of sight of land sometime prior to 62,000 years. Conservative estimates
indicate that it would take at least 5000 years for Aborigines to
inhabit the Lake Willandra area meaning that the earliest time of
occurpation of Australia propbably occurred around 67-68,000 years
ago.This gives mankind quite an ability that long ago. To claim that
hominids prior to this time are merely bipedal hominids (as Hugh Ross
has claimed) seems bizarre. No other placental animal except bats were
able to occupy Australia until Mankind did it around 68,000 years ago.
Mungo man was also ritually buried. He was covered in red ochre. Flood
writes,
"The significance of this ochred burial is that it shows that such
rituals go back at least as far in Australia as in other parts of the
world such as France, where ochred burials have been found in Grimaldi
Cave at a similar time. In fact, at Mungo red pigment was in use even
earlier, for lumps of ochre and stone artefacts were found deep below
the ashes of a fire lit 32000 years ago[this was the old date now it is
62,000 years--grm]. As the ochre did not occur naturally at Mungo, it
must have been deliberately carried there from some distance away.
Similar lumps of pigment, some of them showing signs of use, have been
found in Pleistocene levels in other widely separated sites, such as
Kenniff Cave in Queensland, Cloggs Cave in Victoria, Miriwun in Western
Australia, and several Arnhem Land rockshelters. Ochre has no
utilitarian functions, such as medicinal use; it is simply a pigment
used (at least in the recent past) to decorate rock walls, artefacts,
dancers' bodies in ceremonies, and corpses during some burial rites.
Its use in burial ritual is the only use documented for other purposes."
~ Josephine Flood, "The Archeology of the Dreamtime, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989), p. 46
He showed evidence of the ritual evulsion of teeth which is part of the
modern aboriginal religions. This is where some teeth are
removed.(Clive Gamble, Timewalkers, (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1994), p. 167)
This, then becomes evidence for the continuous religious practice for
the past 62,000 years.
Concerning the place of man in Australia, Flood writes:
"What is the explanation for the co-=existence of these different
groups in the same area of prehistoric Australia? There seem to be
three possibilities. The first is that the two different groups entered
Australia at very different times and later merged or hybridized to form
the modern Aboriginal population. Rhys Jones explains the problem in
terms of gradual inter-breeding. 'I think we are seeing the obvious,
that the Kow Swamp people reflect a relict group of original inhabitants
of Australi, and archaic race of Homo sapiens who first colonised the
continent at least 50 000 years ago. They occupied the well-watered
regions and survived intact for tens of thousands of years. Australia
was then occupied by a second group of modern Homo sapiens, the Mungo
people. They came from south-east Asia and because of their superior
technological powers...they were able to inhabit large areas of the
continent. Eventually the two groups met, and intermarriage between
them led to a new group, from which evolved the modern Aborigine.'" ~
Josephine Flood, "The Archeology of the Dreamtime, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989), p. 68
Schwartz concurs:
"This specimen, cataloged as WLH (*Willandra Lakes Hominid) 50, was
found near Lake Mungo, which is in the Willandra Lakes region in western
New South Wales. Up to 15,000 years ago, these lakes were filled with
fresh water. Now they are dry. The fossil specimen, which is radiant
because it became opalized, consists of a facelenss skull cap. It may
be older than 30,000 years. But Alan has suggested in conversation that
the skull may in fact be much older than that.
"The robustness of the specimen's bone, brow ridge, and distended
occipital region, as well as the degree to which the forehead slopes
backward,
are unmistakable. In fact, and especially in profile, WLH 50 seems to
be a
perfect match for some of the skulls from java that had been found at
the site
of Ngandong, near the Solo River.[this is Sangiran 17 the skull of a
Homo erectus--grm] These Javanese skulls, now referred to the
species Homo erectus instead of Homo soloensis, may be as old as 200,000
years.
Thus, Alan suggests, if there is regional continuity from the past to
modern
aborigines via WLH 50, it extends back perhaps another 160,000 or
170,000 years,
to the Ngandong Homo erectus." ~ Jeffrey H. Schwartz, What the Bones
Tell Us,
(New York: Henry Holt, 1993), p. 208
Obviously, this discovery will reignite the debate about regional
continuity vs. replacement among anthropologists. Given the discovery
of paternal inheritance and recombination of mtDNA which pushes Eve back
to circa 400,000 years ago, and the possible Neanderthal/Human hybrid,
the conclusion becomes almost inescapable that archaic humans are
directly related to modern humans and quite possibly have interbread
with us. This applies to H. erectus in SE Asia as well as the European
Neanderthals. Christians should cease trying to kick against the
flood-tide of data that contradicts what we teach apologetically. Change
is required. Continually ignoring data is what we accuse other religions
of doing. We should not be guilty of it ourselves.
-- glennFoundation, Fall and FloodAdam, Apes and Anthropologyhttp://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm