Humor: Mungo Man rewrites Australian history

Mungo Man rewrites Australian history

When I was a boy my school history books led me to believe that Australia was settled first by the British, in 1788.

I now know that to be nonsense.

The Australian Aborigines were here a lot, lot longer.

How long?

Well, the plot thickens.

Scientists in Canberra, where I live, have released the results of DNA testing of an ancient Australia skeleton.

The man, dubbed Mungo 3, was found in a shallow grave at Willandra Lakes in western NSW.

Get this: the scientists say he is 60,000 years old.

That's 20,000 years older than the next known oldest discovery - a Neanderthal from Croatia.

Some scientists have already disputed the age figure, which, if correct, throws into doubt the popularly-held Out-of-Africa theory which says that modern humans evolved in Africa and then panned out across the globe.

However, some findings cannot be disputed:

Mungo 3's left ankle did NOT show evidence that it had been linked to a ball and chain, thus shooting down any suggestion that he may have been part of an advance party of British convicts.
Nor was he clasping a rugby league ball. For some time now, Australian rugby league players have unkindly been dubbed mungoes. Clearly, we have proof now that this is a slur to Mungo 3.
Nor did he have a soccer ball, a cricket ball or a baseball, which leads me to believe that, despite his alleged age, he was probably more advanced than anyone expected.

The team of scientists - from the Australian National University and the CSIRO - extracted mitochrondrial DNA (mtDNA) from the skeleton and compared it with mtDNA from the bones of nine other ancient Australians from 8000 to 15,000 years ago, 45 indigenous Australians still living, 3400 people from populations around the globe, two Neanderthals, a pygmy chimp, a common chimp and a partridge in a pear tree.

Oops, well not the partridge. I got a bit carried away there. But all the others were matched.

It's bloody marvellous, isn't it?

Forensic people couldn't get the DNA testing right in the O.J. Simpson murder trial in the United States and that was a tad more recent.

Now we can date the remains of someone who might be 60,000 years old. What's more, they'd be able to tell where his iron ball was made had he had an iron ball.

When I was a boy, our school history books weren't the only books that, I know now with the benefit of hindsight, were clearly deficient.

Our science books made no mention of DNA testing for age either.

Had the technology existed, I am sure we would have tried to extract a DNA sample from one of our classmates, a big, dumb kid we called Man Drongo, to see how old he really was.

Man Drongo claimed to be the same age as us but looked much older and we suspected he had been kept back because of poor grades at least nine times.

We learnt the hard way that you never mixed Bunsen burners, combustible chemicals and Man Drongo together.

He never did seem to get the hang of arithmetic either.

The poor clod just could not add up.

He kept forgetting to carry the one, and consequently ended up with outrageously high figures for fairly low equations.

I sometimes wonder what happened to Man Drongo.

In our final year of high school we voted him the Boy Most Likely To Become a Rugby League Player or a Grave Digger.

Someone said recently, however, he had kicked on to become a scientist.

No kidding, I said!

That couldn't be right?

"Yes it is," said my informant. "Here in Canberra, too."

What would the odds of that be, eh? 60,000 to one?

If you'd bet on that, you'd probably still be stupid enough to believe the British were the first people to settle in Australia.

NB: I called this site Dunno because I kept drawing a blank when I had to put a name to it