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They were in the wrong place, but Steve Webb's archaeology class decided to stay anyway. A colleague had mistakenly taken them to a site they'd never visited before, a nondescript-looking claypan lost among the pale dunes in the Willandra Lakes region of far western New South Wales. Luckily, Webb thought it would still make good practice fieldwork for his Aboriginal students after a week of classes in the nearby town of Mildura. He was walking behind one of them, 26-year-old Mary Pappin Jr., when she called out that she'd seen something. What...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Secrets of the Dunes | 3/19/2006 | See Source »

...What she'd chanced upon is still hard to believe - not only the first Ice Age fossilized human footprints found in Australia, but the largest collection ever found anywhere. "You just don't get this sort of archaeological 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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Secrets of the Dunes | 3/19/2006 | See Source »

...Today the landscape they knew looks empty but for lonely turrets of sediment eaten away by the weather and dunes shimmering under a scalding sky. Parched flocks of galahs drift on the hot wind. Yet the Willandra Lakes region, which in 1981 became a 240,000-hectare World Heritage Area, has in the past 30 years yielded astounding archaeological treasures. In 1968 the dunes surrendered Mungo Lady, the skeletal remains of a young woman whose burial site remains the oldest evidence of cremation ever found. The ocher-covered bones of the world's oldest known ritual burial, Mungo Man, were...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Secrets of the Dunes | 3/19/2006 | See Source »

...Just over an hour's drive from Mildura's sprinkler-fed lawns and orange groves, the Willandra is starkly arid. But it wasn't always so forbidding. For thousands of years during the last Ice Age, when it was possible to walk from Tasmania to Papua New Guinea, water was everywhere, with a series of five large, interconnected lakes and 14 smaller ones offering a rich larder - mussels, golden perch and cod, as well as marsupials and water birds - for communities camped on their shores. As the lakes receded and were refilled, prevailing winds layered sand and clay on their...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Secrets of the Dunes | 3/19/2006 | See Source »

...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 years, archaeological study of the Willandra languished. The ban remains in force, but elders say that could change. "The importance of what this landscape holds to the world is very much in our minds," says Mary Pappin Sr. "But so is making sure we do the right thing by our people." Like her mother, young Mary...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Secrets of the Dunes | 3/19/2006 | See Source »

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