Word: webbe
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...signature," says Michael Westaway, executive officer of the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area. "This is a story, really, for everybody." Today the prints look as sharp as if their makers had just hurried over the top of the nearest dune. "Almost as good as a footprint in wet sand," Webb says. Since the 2003 find, which was announced last December, his team has uncovered around 460 human prints crisscrossing the site like the traces of a peak-hour crowd, many deeply impressed in the sediment, clearly showing where mud once squished between toes. From their size and the distance between...
...covered bones of the world's oldest known ritual burial, Mungo Man, were discovered in 1974, and since then more than 150 human burials - most of them more than 10,000 years old - have been unearthed, as well as shell-strewn middens, hearths and the bones of extinct megafauna. Webb, professor of Australian Studies at Bond University, has studied the area for more than 20 years. "I've traveled all over Australia," he says, "and I don't know of anywhere that even comes up to the ankles of this place...
...There remain many questions Webb would love to answer - the prints disappear under a large dune, and results from work with ground-penetrating radar last year suggest the site, perhaps the remnants of a series of ponds, extends far beneath it. "They were in a hurry," he says of the hunters, "and I'd love to catch up with them." He believes the tracks were probably made within a matter of months and preserved when protective layers of silty clay covered the muddy sediment. And it's likely that more tracks remain on several underlying layers. "It's like...
...much research continues at the site, whose precise location is a tightly kept secret, is up to the three tribes - the Mutthi Mutthi, Barkindji and Ngyiampaa - who jointly manage the area with the N.S.W. National Parks and Wildlife Service. The Aboriginal involvement in Webb's excavation team reflects thawing relations with the scientific world. After the discoveries of Mungo Lady and Mungo Man, whose ages are still fiercely debated, scientists flocked to the area. But in the 1980s, dismayed that artefacts and remains were being taken to museums and universities elsewhere, elders shut down research on human burials. For many...
...Some Aboriginal people want the site opened, because tourism would create much-needed jobs for youths. Others want it reburied, with a replica for visitors. While a management plan is devised, Webb worries about erosion: harsh winds are already starting to damage the trackways. For now, simpler measures are being used. A group of Aboriginal women sit filling dozens of knee-high stockings with hot sand. Barefoot, they then move carefully over the dazzlingly white claypan, its surface cracked like china and scattered with cinnamon-colored sand, placing a stocking on each print to shield it from the weather...