Mungo National Park is one of the most extraordinary places in Australia, even though hardly anyone knows it: here, on a dry lake in the New South Wales outback, the oldest human remains on the continent were found. Mungo Lady and Mungo Man, around 42,000 years old, revealed an Aboriginal presence going back millennia and what is considered the world's oldest evidence of ritual cremation. Setting foot in Mungo means walking over one of the longest continuous human stories on the planet.
Its landscape is out of this world: the Willandra Lakes Region, a World Heritage Area, is a system of lakes that dried up around 20,000 years ago and are now dusty plains surrounded by wind-sculpted dunes. The visual highlight is the Walls of China, a large lunette of white and ochre sand and clay that the wind has shaped into spectacular forms, especially magical at sunset.
Mungo is, above all, a sacred place for three Aboriginal peoples — the Paakantji (Barkandji), the Ngiyampaa and the Mutthi Mutthi — its Traditional Custodians, who take part in caring for it and offer guided tours. It is a remote destination with no public transport, explored by car or on a tour, and it combines science, nature and the living culture of Australia's First Peoples like few other places.
Mungo is part of the lands of three Aboriginal peoples — Paakantji (Barkandji), Ngiyampaa and Mutthi Mutthi — who lived around the Willandra Lakes for tens of thousands of years, when they were full of water, fish and life. In 1968, geologist Jim Bowler found the remains of Mungo Lady, and in 1974 those of Mungo Man: at around 42,000 years old, they are among the oldest modern human remains outside Africa and the oldest known evidence of ritual cremation, with the body dusted in red ochre. The finds revolutionised our understanding of human history in Australia. After long negotiations with the Traditional Custodians, Mungo Lady returned to the site in 1992, and both were reburied in 2022. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The birthplace of modern Australia: the First Fleet landed at Sydney Cove in 1788, on the lands of the Eora people. The country's most populous state and home to Sydney and its Opera House, it was the trunk from which all the other colonies branched off and the setting for the first gold rush.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Standing today amid the dust and dunes, it's hard to imagine, but for tens of thousands of years Lake Mungo was full of fresh, deep, cool water. Between roughly 50,000 and 19,000 years ago, the Willandra Lakes system (a chain of lakes fed by an ancient river) was teeming with life. Forests lined the shores, and the waters were full of fish such as Murray cod and golden perch, along with freshwater mussels, frogs and yabbies (freshwater crayfish). Now-extinct megafauna roamed the lake edges, including the largest kangaroo that ever lived.
Aboriginal peoples lived in this generous landscape. The evidence shows a human presence in the Willandra Lakes Region for at least 50,000 years, making it one of the oldest sites of continuous human occupation on the planet. Its inhabitants camped and fished on the dunes along the shores, gathered mussels and plants, hunted lizards, wallabies and wombats, and collected duck and emu eggs. The remains of their hearths, meals and tools were buried in layers of sand that erosion is now slowly uncovering.
Around 40,000 years ago, water levels began to drop and fluctuate. When the last ice age reached its peak, between 22,000 and 18,000 years ago, the freshwater supply was cut off completely: the Willandra Lakes dried up and their beds became covered in gypsum. The wind then began its slow work as a sculptor, building and shaping the dunes and the great lunette we know today as the Walls of China. Beneath that sand, unknown to anyone for millennia, lay an extraordinary archive of human history.
The discovery that put Mungo on the world map began with a geologist walking among the dunes. In 1968, Jim Bowler, a researcher from the University of Melbourne, was studying the geology of the Willandra Lakes when he found human remains that erosion had exposed. They were the bones of a woman who had been cremated, and she was named Mungo Lady. The analysis revealed something astonishing: the remains were tens of thousands of years old and were the oldest known evidence in the world of ritual cremation, a sophisticated funerary practice full of meaning.
Six years later, in February 1974, Bowler made a second, even more striking find. The shifting dunes had exposed another body: a man buried with his hands crossed and sprinkled with red ochre, a pigment that had to be brought from far away. He was named Mungo Man. The careful burial, with ochre, pointed to complex symbolic and spiritual thought. Dating, refined over the years, placed Mungo Man and Mungo Lady at around 42,000 years old, among the oldest remains of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) found outside Africa.
The impact was enormous. Until then, the age of the Aboriginal presence in Australia had been underestimated; Mungo showed, with irrefutable scientific evidence, that First Peoples had lived on the continent for tens of thousands of years, with rich cultures and complex ritual practices. The Willandra Lakes Region was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1981, in recognition of both its natural value and its extraordinary cultural value. Mungo became a worldwide symbol of the depth of human history in Australia.
As if the remains of Mungo Man and Mungo Lady weren't enough, the Willandra Lakes Region holds another treasure unique in the world. On a mud surface that was once the damp edge of an ephemeral lake, hundreds of fossilised human footprints were preserved, dated to around 19,000 to 23,000 years ago. With at least 124 identified footprints (and almost 460 tracks in total), it is the largest known collection of Pleistocene human footprints on the planet.
What makes these footprints so moving is how intimate and everyday they are. They were left by adults, teenagers and children who walked, ran and hunted across the soft mud of a waterhole. Scientists, working alongside Aboriginal trackers, were able to 'read' entire scenes: a group on the move, someone running at great speed, people of different ages moving together. It is a snapshot of a day in the life of these peoples, frozen for twenty millennia and only discovered in 2003.
This record adds to a landscape that is, in itself, an open book of prehistory. Alongside the megafauna fossils (including the largest kangaroo that ever lived), leaves, seeds, pollen and insects were preserved, making it possible to reconstruct what the environment was like when the lakes were full: a world of forests, carnivorous reptiles and large herbivores, very different from today's semi-desert. Recent studies show that modern humans and megafauna coexisted in the area for at least 17,000 years. All this knowledge continues to be cared for and studied, always in dialogue with the custodial peoples.
Mungo's story isn't just about the remote past: it is also the story of how Australia learned, with difficulty, to respect First Peoples. When Mungo Lady and Mungo Man were discovered, they were removed from the site and taken to scientific institutions for study, without consulting Aboriginal communities. For the custodial peoples (the Barkandji/Paakantyi, the Mutthi Mutthi and the Ngiyampaa), these were their ancestors, and their removal was felt as a deep wound.
For decades, the communities called for their ancestors to be returned. That call was part of a wider movement for the repatriation of Aboriginal remains and for recognition of First Peoples' rights and voice over their heritage. After long negotiations with the elders of the three traditional groups, Mungo Lady was returned to Lake Mungo in 1992, and finally, on 24 May 2022, Mungo Lady and Mungo Man were reburied on their Country. The process was not free of tensions and disagreements within the communities themselves about the best way to honour the ancestors, a legitimate and complex debate that continues.
Today, the management of Mungo reflects those lessons: the three custodial peoples take an active part in caring for the park alongside the state parks service, and they are the ones who guide visitors across the sacred lunette of the Walls of China. That living presence is the greatest gift of a visit to Mungo: it is not a museum of an extinct past, but a living Country whose Traditional Owners remain connected to it.
Exploring Mungo means travelling through one of the longest human stories on Earth: from the lakes teeming with life and the first inhabitants 50,000 years ago, through Mungo Lady and Mungo Man and the footprints in the mud, to the repatriation of the ancestors and the role of their descendants as custodians today. Few places in the world pack so much time, so much science and so much living culture into a handful of golden dunes in the Australian outback.
