Willandra Lakes Region
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How it came to be
A chain of dry Pleistocene lake beds lies in semi-arid south-western New South Wales. The lakes stopped functioning as lakes about 18,500 years ago, and the crescent-shaped dunes on their shores hold a record of climate change and human life over the last 100,000 years. Evidence of people here goes back 45,000 to 60,000 years.
In 1968 the geologist Jim Bowler found human bones on the shore of dry Lake Mungo. The next year he returned with the archaeologists John Mulvaney and Rhys Jones, and they found the bones were a woman's. Mungo Lady was cremated about 40,000 years ago, the oldest known ritual cremation in the world. Bowler later found the skeleton of a man, Mungo Man, buried with red ochre.
The region was inscribed in 1981, and its boundary was redrawn in 1995 to about 2,400 square kilometres. Human footprints 19,000 to 23,000 years old were found after inscription. Mungo Lady was returned to the Paakantji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa peoples in 1992, and Mungo Man in 2017.
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