Ok, I hit Google and found some references for Mungo Man. The ones I checked out for some reason seemed to be all Australian references, except Wikipedia. It seems that Oz is where most of the interest is. I guess that's not too surprising. After all a common human reaction to almost anything is "it didn't happen here, so it must not be interesting".
Anyway most of the references that I checked out were fairly impartial, so I got some idea of what is going on. Apparently there are 2 general controversies surrounding Mungo Man.
The first is the age. There are some who claim that he is around 60,000 years old and others who say he is around 40,000 years. Both claim to have good evidence for their claim and that the other side is talking through their hats. I will probably have to go with 40,000 years, but I'm not going to commit to it.
The second is coupled to the first. That is the question of Out of Africa (OOA) and Multiregionalism. I'm going to call this MR. OOA of course says that all modern humans are descendents of a group who migrated out of Africa around 50 to 70 thousand years ago (kya). MR says that all modern humans are descendents of Homo Erectus (HE) that migrated out of Africa around 1.8 million years ago (MYA). The MRs say that all the existing populations evolved from HE in place. To keep them all together so that we wound up with just one species there was a lot of interbreeding between the isolated populations around the world. I personally think OOA is correct. The interbreeding postulated by the MRs would require that our ancestors were committed travelers, constantly running around meeting and breeding with the neighbors, even when the neighbors were cut off from them by mountain ranges, deserts, and oceans. The MRs are jumping on the 60 kya age to claim that it proves they are right, because OOA wouldn't have had time to get to OZ by that time.
One of the sites I found had some good info, but they also had some of the most profound bushwa I have ever seen. So you want to take what you find on the internet with a large grain of salt.
Bill Gill
