Preservation+of+the+body

Preservation of the Skeletons

 * Discovered more than 20 years ago Lake Mungo 3 has not been described in detail. Bowler and Thorne (1976) limit their morphological description to a brief discussion of preservation and the factors which indicate age at death and sex.
 * While photographs of the burial in situ suggest reasonable preservation this was not the situation post excavation.
 * Most recently Thorne (1999) report that the age of the Lake Mungo 3 burial, as determined by the combined results of electron spin resonance (ESR) on dental enamel, U-series on calcite crust covering the skeleton and OSL on the sediment surrounding the skeleton indicate colonisation during or before oxygen isotope stage 4 (57,000-71,000).
 * The bottom of the Mungo Unit from which LM3 was recovered has been securely dated to 43,000 years
 * Bowler and Thorne limit their morphological description to a brief discussion of preservation and the factors which indicate age at death and sex.
 * It is clear that Lake Mungo 3 was an older adult.


 * When LM3 was discovered it had been exposed by erosion.
 * Climate of the Willandra Lakes is unlikely to be conducive to organic preservation, particularly at the date of 60 kyr
 * Their have been some criticisms of their claims, largely as their results have not been independently tested, and contamination has proved to be an enormous problem in fossil DNA research
 * There maybe something unusual about the preservation of LM3, or the great care in which it was processed by Greg Adcock, but at present the preservation of mtDNA in LM3 is at odds with what is known from the rest of the world

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 * A review of the historical literature demonstrates that this interpretation is incorrect (Thorne 1976; Brown 1997). Cooper et al (2001) argue that standard DNA authentication criteria, including independent replication, biochemical studies of bone preservation, and cloning of DNA sequences should have been used to rule out possible contamination from modern handling.
 * the results when studying Mungo Man could be unreliable because of human factors in the postmortem procedures and therefore possibly corrupted
 * They suggest that postmortem damage may explain many unusual results obtained from ancient human remains when appropriate techniques were not followed, including the "Mungo man" sequences published by Adcock et al. (2001). Therfore many of the results in the investigation of Mungo Man may not be accurate.
 * This may prove impossible as the Kow Swamp skeletons were all supposed to have been returned for reburial in 1986, and it is unlikely that Aboriginal communities will be sympathetic to further testing of the LM3 skeleton.
 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">The preservation of the Skeletons are accidental however their burial and cremations were deliberate. The bone fragments of Mungo Lady were preserved because of the calcified soil.