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Australia’s oldest man has gotten younger - 22 000 years younger. A new barrage of tests on the ancient remains of ‘Mungo Man’, a skeleton discovered in south eastern Australia in 1974, show he died 40,000 years ago, not 62,000 years ago as had been suggested, a scientist said.
The bones have been contentious ever since their discovery, with their exact age the subject of intense debate.
A female skeleton found nearby five years earlier and known as ‘Mungo Woman’ was also dated at about 40,000 years old -- older than previously thought -- by a team led by scientists at Melbourne University.
Their findings were to be published in the February 20 issue of the respected international science journal, Nature. “The ages paint a new picture of the human and climatic history of Australia,” said geologist Jim Bowler, the man who discovered the skeletons and who is now a Professorial Fellow with the University of Melbourne.
“Australia’s colonisation is one of the keys to our understanding of how Homo sapiens evolved and spread around the world,” Bowler said in a statement. “It is critical we get the story correct.”
In 1999, researchers at the Australian National University sparked heated global debate on the origins of human beings when they said tests on the skeleton and its sandy grave showed Mungo Man was 62,00 years old. That date suggested that Australia was home to a group of anatomically modern Aboriginal people much earlier than thought.
In a paper in the American journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, anthropologist Dr Alan Thorne of the Australian National University said the DNA findings cast doubt on the so-called Out of Africa model of human evolution.
 That model proposes that all living people are descended from a group of modern Homo sapiens who left their African homeland 150,000 years to 100,000 years ago. The group and their descendants spread around the world, replacing existing populations of older peoples, including Neanderthals and Homo Erectus.
In the latest contribution to the debate, Bowler amassed a team of experts from universities and scientific organisations across Australia and four separate dating laboratories to achieve a final consensus, he said in his statement.
“The new age corrects previous estimates and provides a new picture of Homo sapiens adapting to deteriorating climate in Australia,” he said.
Bowler said he was not concerned with his findings’ influence on the debate about the evolution of mankind.
(From Independent Online)
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