Arguing against the evidence: ‘Mungo myths’

After assessment of Australia's oldest fossil human remains in the previous chapter, I feel a few old chestnuts should be addressed before going further. These involve the morphological appearance of individuals in the Willandra Lakes collection and the validity of the sex and age assigned to primary examples.

The fact that there are many gracile individuals in the Willandra series vastly weakens the argument that WLH1 and 3 are unique archaeological finds, occupying a position at one end of a single range of skeletal variation. By its very nature, a range of variation usually follows a bell curve. This would place only a few gracile people at one end and correspondingly few robusts at the other. The regularity with which starkly contrasting robust and gracile individuals are found in the Willandra, however, makes the one range of variation arguments untenable, because it is unlikely that so many individuals at either end of such a morphological spectrum would be discovered purely by chance, while the types in between remain comparatively few.

Working in this field, one often hears whispers on the ether concerning certain fossil remains. There is one about WLH1 which says that this individual should be called ‘Mungo Girl’ rather than ‘Mungo Lady’, her sub-adult status thus explaining her gracility. More often than not such whispers are started by those having little or no experience of examining the remains, and in certain cases have never set eyes on them.