Mock Test 3

A. Fifty thousand years ago, a lush landscape greeted the first Australians making their way towards the south-east of the continent. Temperatures were cooler than now. Megafauna such as marsupial lions, goannas and the rhinoceros-sized diprotodon were abundant. The Lake Mungo remains are three prominent sets of fossils which tell archaeologists the story: Mungo Man lived around the shores of Lake Mungo with his family. When he was young, Mungo Man lost his two lower canine teeth, possibly knocked out in a ritual. He grew into a man nearly 1.7m in height. Over the years his molar teeth became worn and scratched, possibly from eating a gritty diet or stripping the long leaves of water reeds with his teeth to make twine. As Mungo Man grew older his bones ached with arthritis, especially his right elbow. Such wear and tear is typical of people who have used a woomera to throw spears over many years. Mungo Man died when he was about 50. His family mourned for him and carefully buried him in the lunette, on his back with his hands crossed in his lap, and sprinkled him with red ochre. Mungo Man is the oldest known example in the world of such a ritual.

B. This treasure-trove of history was found by University of Melbourne geologist Professor Jim Bowler in 1969. He was searching for ancient lakes and came across the charred remains of Mungo Lady, who had been cremated. In 1974, he found a second complete skeleton, Mungo Man, buried 300 metres away. Using carbon-dating, the skeleton was first estimated at 28,000 to 32,000 years old. The comprehensive study of 25 different sediment layers at Mungo concludes that both graves are 40,000 years old.

C. This is much younger than the 62,000 years Mungo Man was attributed in 1999 by a team led by Professor Alan Thorne, of the Australian National University. The modern-day story of the science of Mungo also has its fair share of rivalry. Thorne is the country's leading opponent of the Out of Africa theory that Homo sapiens had a single place of origin. Dr Alan Thorne supports the multi-regional explanation, that modern humans arose simultaneously in Africa, Europe and Asia from Homo erectus.

D. Out of Africa supporters are not about to let go of their beliefs because of the Australian research. Professor Chris Stringer, from the Natural History Museum in London, said that the research community would want to see the work repeated in other labs before major conclusions were drawn. He said the DNA sequences could simply mean there was much more genetic diversity in the past than previously realised. For Bowler, these debates are speculative distractions from the study's main findings. At 40,000 years old, Mungo Man and Mungo Lady remain Australia's oldest human burials and the earliest evidence on Earth of cultural sophistication. In 1997, Paabo's research group recovered an mtDNA fingerprint from the Feldhofer Neanderthal skeleton uncovered in Germany in 1865.

E. In its 1999 study, Thorne's team used three techniques to date Mungo Man at 62,000 years old, and it stands by its figures. It dated bone, teeth enamel and sand. Bowler has strongly challenged the results ever since. Dating human bones is notoriously unreliable, he says. The sand sample Thorne's group dated was taken hundreds of metres from the burial site. Bowler argues that the age of the sand is not the same as the age of the grave.

F. Thorne counters that Bowler's team used one dating technique, while he used three. Professor Rainer Grun says the fact that the latest results were consistent between laboratories does not mean they are absolutely correct. There are two contradictory data sets and he does not have a plausible explanation. Thorne now says the age of Mungo Man is irrelevant to the origins debate. Recent fossil finds show modern humans were in China 110,000 years ago, so Mungo Man had a long time to turn up in Australia whether he is 40,000 or 60,000 years old.

G. Dr Tim Flannery, a proponent of the theory that Australia's megafauna were wiped out 46,000 years ago in a blitzkrieg of hunting by the arriving people, also claims the new Mungo dates support this view. Flannery praises the Bowler team's research on Mungo Man as the most thorough and rigorous dating of ancient human remains. He says the finding that humans arrived at Lake Mungo between 46,000 and 50,000 years ago was a critical time in Australia's history. There is no evidence of a dramatic climatic change then, he says.

H. Bowler, however, is skeptical of Flannery's theory and says the Mungo study provides no definitive new evidence to support it. He argues that climate change at 40,000 years ago was more intense than previously realized and could have played a role in the megafauna's demise. To blame the earliest Australians for their complete extinction is drawing a longbow.