Sydney, Australia - Australia's oldest man has gotten younger - 22 000 years younger.
A new barrage of tests on the ancient remains of "Mungo Man", a skeleton discovered in southeastern Australia in 1974, show he died 40 000 years ago, not 62 000 years ago as had been suggested, a scientist said on Wednesday.
The bones have been contentious ever since their discovery, with their exact age the subject of intense debate.
A female skeleton found nearby five years earlier and known as "Mungo Woman" was also dated at about 40 000 years old - older than previously thought - by a team led by scientists at Melbourne University.
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| 'The ages paint a new picture of the human and climatic history of Australia' |
Their findings were to be published in the Feb. 20 issue of the respected international science journal, Nature.
"The ages paint a new picture of the human and climatic history of Australia," said geologist Jim Bowler, the man who discovered the skeletons and who is now a Professorial Fellow with the University of Melbourne.
"Australia's colonisation is one of the keys to our understanding of how Homo sapiens evolved and spread around the world," Bowler said in a statement. "It is critical we get the story correct."
In 1999, researchers at the Australian National University sparked heated global debate on the origins of human beings when they said tests on the skeleton and its sandy grave showed Mungo Man was 62 000 years old.
That date suggested that Australia was home to a group of anatomically modern Aboriginal people much earlier than thought.
In a paper in the American journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, anthropologist Dr Alan Thorne of the Australian National University said the DNA findings cast doubt on the so-called Out of Africa model of human evolution.
That model proposes that all living people are descended from a group of modern Homo Sapiens who left their African homeland 150 000 years to 100 000 years ago. The group and their descendants spread around the world, replacing existing populations of older peoples, including Neanderthals and Homo Erectus.
In the latest contribution to the debate, Bowler amassed a team of experts from universities and scientific organisations across Australia and four separate dating laboratories to achieve a final consensus, he said in his statement.
"The new age corrects previous estimates and provides a new picture of Homo sapiens adapting to deteriorating climate in Australia," he said.
Bowler told The Associated Press in a telephone interview he was not concerned with his findings' influence on the debate about the evolution of mankind.
"I'm just a geologist," he said.
Bowler's team used tests that date sand grains by measuring the amount of damage the grain has suffered over time from radiation in the ground.
He said the team's testing was far more comprehensive than any previously done on Mungo Man and his desert resting place.
One of the scientists involved in the 1999 dating of Mungo Man, Rainer Gruen, said the latest research should stand alongside his team's efforts. Gruen used similar techniques to Bowler and also tested DNA recovered from the skeleton.
"They are (both) valid scientific results," he told a national newspaper, The Australian.
Dr Paul Tacon, head of the People and Places Research Center at the Australian Museum, said it could be time to have a third independent analysis to definitively settle the bones' age.
"Here we have such a major discrepancy on such important material... not only for Australia but for human evolution globally, that I believe another dating attempt should be undertaken perhaps by a third independent team and then the jury will no longer be out." - Sapa-AP
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