Mungo Lady: the earliest known human cremation
- Date
- c. 42,000 years ago
- Category
- Religion & ideology
- Region
- Sahul (southeastern Australia)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
In 1968 the geologist Jim Bowler found burnt and crushed human bones eroding from the lunette dunes of dry Lake Mungo in the Willandra Lakes region of southeastern Australia.
Designated LM1 and known as Mungo Lady, the remains are dated to roughly 40,000 to 42,000 years ago and constitute the oldest securely identified evidence of cremation anywhere in the world. The treatment of the body was elaborate: it was burned, the bones deliberately smashed, then burned again before burial. The nearby burial of Mungo Man (LM3), interred and sprinkled with ochre transported from hundreds of kilometres away, dates to a similar period. Together these finds reveal that the first Australians practised complex, structured mortuary rituals deep in the Pleistocene, implying sophisticated belief systems and social organisation. The remains hold profound significance for the Paakantji, Muthi Muthi and Ngiyampaa peoples; they were repatriated to the traditional owners in 1992 and later reburied.
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Related religion & ideology events
- The Löwenmensch (Lion-Man): earliest figurative sculpturec. 41,000 to 35,000 years ago
- Construction of the White Temple and Anu Ziggurat at Urukc. 3500 BCE
- Neanderthal mortuary behaviour at Shanidar Cavec. 75,000 to 60,000 years ago
- Plastered ancestral skulls of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Bc. 10,500 to 9,000 years ago (c. 8800 to 7000 BCE)
- Composition of the Rigvedac. 1500-1200 BCE
- Akhenaten's Atenist revolution and the Amarna periodc. 1348 BCE
Essential reading
- Behavioural modernity and major Out-of-Africa dispersalc. 70,000 to 50,000 years ago
- The Pleistocene-Holocene boundary and the start of the Holocenec. 11,700 years ago (c. 9700 BCE)
- Monumental urbanism at Caral and the Norte Chico civilisationc. 2600 BCE
- Standardised Binary Weights System of the Indusc. 2600 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Religion
Accessible sweep of humanity's faiths and belief systems from prehistory to the present.
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