World's oldest

It's a long and dusty road to Lake Mungo, but for me it was very much a highlight of my recent road trip. I'd felt drawn to the place ever since the 1974 discovery of the perhaps 60,000 year old fossilised Mungo Man. The slightly younger Mungo Woman had been discovered there in 1969.

So this is the site of the oldest known human civilisation. Ritualistic cremations were involved.




Australia's oldest fossilised human footprints are there too, and you can compare them against your own, if you choose to. They date to 20,000 years ago.

Lake Mungo is in the far west of NSW, about 100km north east of Mildura and north west of  Balranald. It's in the Mungo National Park, and is part of the Willandra Lakes World Heritage region.

Most of the archeological finds come from the shores of the now dry lake. If you book onto a guided tour, you can progress beyond the boardwalk and information signs.















There's a 70km loop everyone can do though, which takes you to several more lookouts and points of interest.

Back to the Visitor Centre, and the world's oldest civilisation thing. I was rather taken by the innovative way they portrayed the time span. Every person on the big wall chart represents ten generations.

Solo pursuits 2: Java Man

A few kilometres north of Solo is the village of Sangiran. It's here that the best specimens of Java Man remains were discovered in the late 19th century, and it's here they've built a museum about him.

Java Man was hailed as one of the 'missing link' species, bolstering support for Darwin's recently published evolution theory. Examples have been dated at nearly 2 million years to about 140 thousand years before the present, and found subsequently in lots of places around the world.

The Sangiran museum has a lot of  educational stuff about evolution generally, as well as documenting and housing some of the local finds. It also has a few references to Homo floresiensis, 'yang sangat problematis' ('which is highly problematic'). The problem, as I understand it, is that while almost all the world's archeologists consider the 'Hobbit' to be a distinct species of tiny hominid which survived on Flores until fairly recently, this was hotly contested by the top Indonesian paleoanthropologist. Teuku Jacob is dead now, so his name can be blackened. He's said (by the foreigners at least) to have stolen the exhibits, damaged a valuable specimen, and had the cave where it was found blocked off so he couldn't be proved wrong. My Indonesian isn't good enough to work out what the Java Man museum's official line is on the controversy.

I got to Sangiran very easily by public bus and motorcycle pillion taxi, and spent a comfortable hour or two wandering through the galleries, enjoying the airconditioned respite from the heat outside.

Homo erectus (Java Man) is the third from the left on their illustration below.