Lake Mungo Lake Mungo Lake Mungo is a dry lake located in south-eastern Australia, in the south-western portion of New South Wales. It is about 760 km due west of Sydney and 90 km north-east of Mildura. The lake is the central feature of Mungo National Park, and is one of seventeen lakes in the World Heritage listed Willandra Lakes Region. Many important archaeological findings have been made at the lake, most significantly the discovery of the remains of Mungo Man, the oldest human remains found in Australia, Mungo Woman, the oldest human remains in the world to be ritually cremated and
Lake Mungo remains the original (perhaps remarkably small) group of humans who left Africa via the middle-East. In 2001, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from the Lake Mungo 3 (LM3) skeleton was published and compared with several other sequences. It was found to have more than the expected number of sequence differences when compared to modern human DNA (CRS). Comparison of the mitochondrial DNA with that of ancient and modern Aborigines led to the conclusion that Mungo Man fell outside the range of genetic variation seen in Australian Aboriginal people, and was used to support the multiregional origin of modern humans hypothesis. These results proved