I’ve been to a few underwhelming Unesco World Heritage Sites. Take the Struve Geodetic Arc, which curves almost invisibly across Eastern Europe. I visited without even realising. As for the Fray Bentos corned beef factory, in Uruguay, I’m writing this about 20 minutes from the Fray Bentos corned beef factory and I’m still reluctant to go and see.
The same might be thought of Australia’s Lakes of Willandra, which I visited around 2014. Unesco itself describes them as ‘fossil remains of lakes and sand formations from the Pleistocene’, which is not exactly heart-racing. They are unhelpfully located in the south-west corner of New South Wales – lost in semi-desert, far from anywhere. And yet this obscure, remote site is right now the focus of a scientific furore, and a skirmish in the culture wars, a clash which may change the way we see human history.
What makes Willandra so important? On the face of it, not much – it is a sequence of dead dunes and dried-out waterways, originally formed around two million years ago. For a long time it was home to a menagerie of terrifying megafauna – think three-metre-high kangaroos, enormous emus and reptiles, and Zygomaturus trilobus, a wombat the size of a hippo.
However, there are many sites in Australia that boast remains of giant marsupials and the like. What marks out Willandra is the extraordinary evidence of early modern man: some of the earliest outside Africa – indeed some of the earliest in the world. Around the lakes, scientists have discovered the first evidence of human cremation – dating back 42,000 years. Nearby is the world’s largest group of fossilised human footprints.
Multiple hominid remains have also been found, from Mungo Man and Mungo Lady to the so-called Garnpung Giant. These are some of the most tantalising hominid fossils ever unearthed, as they exhibit features that suggest wide migration and intermixing between early human species (Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc.). They might even challenge the Out of Africa thesis, still the consensus among scientists. Mungo Man, in particular, appears to have mitochondrial DNA distinct from that of every single living human, which comes from Africa’s earliest populations. Mr and Mrs Mungo were also much more slender than other early Australian hominid remains, suggesting there might have been multiple migrations to the southern continent.
It was therefore with some anticipation that I made it to Willandra, trundling past a mildly bemused security guard. And what I found did not disappoint. Willandra is one of the most hauntingly empty places I have been. It consists of dry, desolate walls of crumbling yellow sand and rock. These lunettes stand about like mourners next to a grave – lamenting the vanished water of the lakes. Everywhere you go, the cracked soils are speckled with fossilised oyster shells – signs of early human life, when our ancestors would sit, scoff half a dozen on the half-shell, then move on.
Willandra is therefore a pivotal place in human history. And yet, as you read this, those human fossils are being reburied. Mungo Man and Lady are already gone; around a hundred other remains are following. All are being destroyed, like medieval books burned in a pyre.
Why? Politics and guilt. At the behest of some Aboriginal groups, the precious bones of the ‘first peoples’ are being reburied. This is occurring in the traditional way and in secret. The locations will then be willingly forgotten. As one Aboriginal elder, Ivan Johnson, has put it: ‘It’s been a long wait: 50 years to bury our ancestors.’
On the face of it, honouring these Aboriginal desires might seem just. Australia rightly feels remorse about the way it has, in the past, treated Indigenous Australian history, beliefs and remains. But what is happening at Willandra perhaps goes beyond redemption, because so many questions remain unanswered.
Are these fossilised hominids really the direct ancestors of the modern Aboriginal people who inhabit this corner of Australia? Perhaps they point to a more complex history. Perhaps they show that the people we regard as the first Australians are not, in fact, the first Australians. This would be awkward for some Aboriginal voices which – like Indigenous voices elsewhere in the world – ascribe to so-called indigenous creationism, the idea that no one came before them. That argument is the core premise of the idea that they are the true inheritors of the land. New queries about the nature of ancestral Australia might complicate current debates about Aboriginal shares of mineral rights.
The fact is, we simply haven’t solved the secrets of Willandra, which is why archaeologists are not done with the place. Now we will never know, as the evidence is being purposefully lost – along with any evidence that potentially contradicts the Out of Africa thesis. What’s more, the destruction of these bones is being done despite contrary opinions. Some Aboriginal groups have expressed disquiet, suggesting the bones be given sacred status but still made available for science.
Academics have likewise raised concern in Australian courts and in letters to Unesco. As one University of Queensland academic, Michael Westaway, put it: ‘Mungo Man and Mungo Lady changed the way we understood ancient Australia… I think that is a great loss not just to Aboriginal Australians and non-Aboriginal Australians but also to all of humanity.’
Nonetheless, it is happening. The reburials may be completed by the end of this month. If it is all too late, I shall console myself with one thing. Before I left Willandra, a local in a bar gave me one of the millions of ancient oyster shells, perhaps 20,000 years old (not a crime; it came from outside the official site). Today, the shell sits on my shelf at home, glinting in the light – one of the last remnants of a remarkable human history, now on the verge of being forever erased.
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