Made in Africa: Hominin Explorations and the Australian Skeletal
Evidence describes and documents the largest collection of modern human
remains in the world from its time period. These Australian fossils,
which represent modern humans at the end of their great 20,000 km
journey from Africa, may be reburied in the next two years at the
request of the Aboriginal community.
Part one of the book provides an overview of modern humans, their
ancestors, and their journeys, explores the construct of human evolution
over the last two and half million years, and defines the background to
the first hominins and later modern humans to leave Africa, cross the
world and meet other archaic peoples who had also travelled and
undergone similar evolutionary pathways.
Part two focuses on Australia and the evidence for its earliest people.
The Willandra Lakes fossils represent the earliest arrivals and are the
largest and most diverse late Pleistocene collection from this part of
the world. Although twenty to twenty-five thousand years younger than
the oldest archaeological site in Australia, they exemplify the
migrating end-point of the human story that reflect a diversity and
culture not recorded elsewhere in the world.
Part three records the Willandra Lake Collection itself from a
photographic and descriptive perspective.
Evolutionary biologists and geneticists will find this book to be a
valuable documentation of the 20,000 km hominid migration from Africa to
the most distant parts of the world, and of the challenges and findings
of the Willandra Lake Collection.
