Post by Deleted on Mar 4, 2017 15:56:54 GMT
Mungo Man, who was discovered in 1974 in the dry lake bed of Lake Mungo in west NSW. Mungo Man was a hominin who was estimated to have died 62,000 years ago and was ritually buried with his hands covering his penis. Anatomically, Mungo Man's bones were distinct from other human skeletons being unearthed in Australia. Unlike the younger skeletons that had big-brows and thick-skulls, Mungo Man's skeleton was finer, and more like modern humans.
The ANU's John Curtin School of Medical Research found that Mungo Man's skeleton's contained a small section of mitochondrial DNA. After analysing the DNA, the school found that Mungo Man's DNA bore no similarity to the other ancient skeletons, modern Aborigines and modern Europeans. Furthermore, his mitochondrial DNA had become extinct. The results called into question the 'Out of Africa' theory of human evolution. If Mungo Man was descended from a person who had left Africa in the past 200,000 years, then his mitochondrial DNA should have looked like all of the other samples.
Another spanner in the traditional theories are the Kow Swamp skeletons from northern Victoria, which are reminiscent of Homo erectus. Specifically, they have thick brow ridges, sloping foreheads and very large teeth. If the Kow Swamp skeletons had been found in Indonesia and dated at 100,000 + years, then they might have been categorised as Homo erectus but being found in Australia and dated at only 10,000 years was problematic. According to traditional theories, Homo erectus never reached Australia and was believed to have died out when Homo sapiens reached Indonesia in excess of 50,000 years ago. Even if the Kow Swamp people weren't Homo erectus, it was hard to explain why an ancient looking people occupied Australia after a more modern looking people. As explained by Professor Alan Thorne,
"The Kow Swamp people have thick brow ridges, very large faces and the biggest teeth that have ever existed in modern humans. And that creates a problem. They look ancient but at 10,000 years of age they’re much younger than the lightly built Mungo people. How could that be?"
One academic, Dr Tim Stone from the University of Melbourne, tried to argue the unusual skeletal shapes were the result of some kind of localised adaptation to the cold. (1) Stone basically argued that the Homo sapiens of the area evolved to look like Homo erectus because the body shape was better suited to the climate. In Stone's view, no other Australian population groups looked like them because the Kow Swamp people became geographically isolated for tens of thousands of years.
Stone's argument was an illogical considering that Kow Swamp was on a relatively flat area of land near the Murray River, which would likely attract high volumes of human traffic. As a point of comparison, a small population of humans in Tasmania were genetically isolated for at least 10,000 years in a very cold climate. Although paintings and photos show a slight divergence from some mainland Aborigines, their skeletons and features looked very similar to modern gracile humans.
Tasmanian Aborigines looked a lot like Africans but despite being isolated for perhaps 10,000 years in a cold climate, they still looked like modern humans.
Other academics have argued that the unusual head shapes of the Kow Swamp people were the result of cranial modification (3). In other parts of the world, this occurs due to mothers wrapping cloth around their infants' heads.
Like Stone's theory of climatic adaption, this was also an illogical explanation as body modification of infants tends to be a feature of agricultural societies that have developed hierarchical systems of status. Furthermore, it usually requires cloth to place sustained pressure on the child's skull and there is no evidence of weaving amongst Aborigines. Admittedly, it had been observed in Cape York where an adult pushed on the infants forehead using their hands to flatten the face, but it was extremely rare.
One academic defending the orthodox position, Dr Colin Groves, didn't even bother offering any explanations and simply said that those who did were racist because the explanations would interfere with contemporary activist campaigns. In his own words:
"But at the same time as one "pure-race" hypothesis was hitting the dust, another was rising. Ancient Australian skeletons were being discovered in Victoria and southern New South Wales, and they seemed to show great diversity. None of them were Negritos, Murrayians or Carpentarians, but those from Keilor and Lake Mungo were like modern Aboriginal people, whereas some (not all) of those from Kow Swamp had very flat, sloping foreheads, and some people even likened them to so-called "Java Man", Homo erectus, that had preceded modern humans (Homo sapiens) in the region to the Northwest of Australasia at least as late as 300,000 years ago. Unfortunately, although Alan Thorne, the describer of the Kow Swamp skeletons, never actually said that they were Homo erectus, the idea that an extremely primitive people preceded the present Aboriginal people in Australia, and was eliminated by them, seems to have seeped into some folks' consciousness just like the Negritos did. Negritos or Homo erectus - either way, the Aborigines were not the first possessors of Australia so the land doesn't really belong to them and the whites needn't feel too bad about dispossessing them. Really good fodder, this, for the One Nation Party, and the Prime Minister needn't feel he has to say "sorry".
If sarcasm and the need to conform to contemporary activist campaigns were highly valued qualities in academic inquiry, then it appeared as though Groves had made a powerful and compelling argument.
Different humans found in Australia
Some theories based on the skeletal record have proposed that the first humans in Australia were the "negrito" Tasmanian people, who were displaced by "Murrayans", who were in turn displaced by "Carpentarians". Academics like Dr Colin Groves have proposed that the theories are racist and that there was only one migration and all Aborigines are the descendents from that one migration.
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