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 40,000–42,000 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.

Related religion & ideology events

• The Löwenmensch (Lion-Man): earliest figurative sculpture
  c. 41,000–35,000 years ago
• Construction of the White Temple and Anu Ziggurat at Uruk
  c. 3500 BCE
• Neanderthal mortuary behaviour at Shanidar Cave
  c. 75,000 – 60,000 years ago
• Plastered ancestral skulls of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B
  c. 10,500 – 9,000 years ago (c. 8800–7000 BCE)
• Composition of the Rigveda
  c. 1500-1200 BCE
• Akhenaten's Atenist revolution and the Amarna period
  c. 1348 BCE

Further reading

A Little History of Religion

The wider story

A Little History of Religion

Richard Holloway

Accessible sweep of humanity's faiths and belief systems from prehistory to the present.

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