by Heidi Norman
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On 25 February 2014, almost 40 years to the day since his extraordinary find, Jim made an impassioned plea in a number of newspapers for Mungo Man to finally be returned to Willandra. Jim argues that the bones have yielded all they can to research and that the NSW State Government and ANU should fast-track their return. ‘Keeping him in a cardboard box for 40 years is long enough. It doesn’t mean that’s the end of scientific research by any means, but it’s time for him to come home to his country. I won’t be here in another ten years, and I feel a sense of responsibility.’
For many years, plans have been discussed for a mausoleum or crypt to be built to house the remains. This subterranean ‘Keeping Place’ would see Mungo Man, Mungo Lady and the others returned to the ground, but it would also comprise a research facility so study could continue. A new visitor centre would be incorporated above ground. Designs have already been outlined by leading Australian architects Gregory Burgess and Glenn Murcutt. However, funding to realise this vision has yet to materialise, and support is growing from some in the community for the bones to simply be returned to the ground as repatriated remains have been in other parts of Australia.
‘There are ongoing discussions that are complex both in terms of cultural agreement and the architecture of the physical construction,’ Jim says. Robyn Parker, former NSW minister for the environment, told reporters in February: ‘While we are committed to the repatriation as soon as possible, the decision as to what will occur with the ancestral remains rests with the traditional owners … and those discussions are continuing.’
Harvey says that although, in principle, there would be no objection from ANU if the traditional owners turned up tomorrow to collect the remains, many questions are still to be answered – such as how they will be returned, whether the 100 or so other sets of human remains at ANU will also be returned, and if the remains will be made accessible to scientists. These questions are currently being considered by Paakantyi, Ngiyampaa and Mutthi Mutthi elders, who are yet to decide when and how the remains will be returned.
Michael Westaway is among few experts who’ve completed a detailed analysis of the wider collection of Willandra remains, and, over the years, has had support from elders for most of the research he has asked to do. He agrees the remains should be returned, but not that research has been exhausted. ‘There’s new technology, such as protein sequencing of DNA. While other ancient DNA techniques have failed, this might actually work,’ he says. ‘We’ve got these fantastic new tools and even though the fossils are fragmentary, they can still tell us a great deal.’
Working with Professors David Lambert at Griffith University and Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen, in Denmark, Michael has attempted to sequence DNA from Mungo Man, and plans to compare it with the DNA of living members of the three tribal groups. The results are yet to be published. He says he’s hoping for more time to use new ANU facilities before the remains are returned. Then, with luck, if they end up in a Keeping Place at Mungo, researchers would still have access, but the elders would have more control. ‘The fossils will be back in the landscape … and hopefully from that there will be more willingness on the part of the elders for research.’
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Forty-two thousand years ago, people at Willandra lived a relatively easy life. Game was abundant and fish were easy to catch. Aged about 50, the man whose remains came to be buried in the Mungo lunette was coming to the end of his life. He had watched his final sunrise and sunset over the dune. Four decades of throwing spears had given him an arthritic elbow, and on his last night, he sat by the fire rubbing it for the last time. His teeth were similarly worn from a lifetime stripping water reeds to make twine.
Ritual was important to his people, and in his youth his canine teeth had been knocked out in an initiation ceremony. After he died that night, ritual played its part when his family gathered in mourning to bury him in the dune. As pungent smoke from smouldering branches of emu bush filled the air, they placed him on his back, hands crossed in his lap, and sprinkled him with precious red ochre. Much of this we know from clues in his grave.
For the next 40 millennia, Mungo Man’s people found a way to survive by sustainably managing the landscape. As the Ice Age waxed and waned, and waters came and went, they adapted and thrived. Many years and countless generations later, Mary Pappin thinks back to the lives of her ancestors. She points out that Europeans have been here for just 200 years, less than 1 per cent of that time, yet have already wrought irreparable damage. You can see this on a small scale at Mungo, in the way grazing pressure has caused the dunes to collapse.
‘Aboriginal people have an intense commitment to country even today. Europeans have lost that connection. Country to us is something you dig up and export to China,’ Jim says. ‘Mungo Man’s return now is essential, because it’s only when he comes back to his country that his message will really come to life and be heard across Australia. That message is about what have we done to his land and what have we done to his people.’
The vanishing writers
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How dust affects climate, health and … everything
Uncharted waters
Daniel Stacey
In the weeks after Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 vanished, most likely in the Indian Ocean, Australian officials said they knew less about the area they were exploring than is known about the surface of the moon.
It’s actually even worse than that.
Surveys of Mars and Venus are considered around 250 times more accurate than existing maps of the underwater region where Flight 370 searchers are looking – a lightless, virtually lifeless seabed.
There, the contours of the ocean floor have only been approximated by bouncing satellite radar off the surface of the sea, or by taking low-resolution sonar soundings from boats that passed through the area a generation ago. Research indicates the presence of dramatic vistas, including a volcanic plateau and mountains roughly the height of the Swiss Alps. There is so little bacteria that scientists believe a whale carcass would take decades to decompose down there.
The hunt for Flight 370 has been overshadowed in recent days by the Malaysia Airlines jet shot down in Ukraine, but it remains one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history. Unlike the Ukraine tragedy, which left tons of debris, not even a stray suitcase has been found from Flight 370, which disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March with 239 passengers on board, leaving little more than a trail of cryptic satellite transmissions behind as it diverted off course.
Investigators have used those digital handshakes between the plane and an Inmarsat PLC telecommunications satellite to identify an area the size of West Virginia where they think the plane crashed in the water after it ran out of fuel. But an initial effort to probe the depths in a different area using a submersible drone called Bluefin-21 found nothing.
Now, two months after pausing its search, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau is ready to reboot the massive probe. It is poised to select among bids from the world’s most advanced deep-water specialists, including offshore oil-and-gas companies, maritime research institutions and treasure hunters eager to use their technologies and experience to solve the Flight 370 riddle – and potentially raise their own profiles in the process. The ATSB is expected to choose one or more of the bidders over the next several weeks before relaunching the search with US$56 million in funding in late August 2015. Those costs will be split, in amounts still to be determined, between the Australian and Malaysian governments.
The good news is that the world’s deep-sea recovery industry is now more sophisticated than ever, thanks to offshore research by oil-and-gas firms that have gone progressively deeper, as well as militaries and insurance firms. Technologies developed to hunt for everything from the Titanic to lost parts of the space shuttle Challenger have further expanded frontiers, allowing investigators to work as deep as about 3.7 miles, or slightly
more than the deepest-known area of the Flight 370 search zone.
‘It used to be that when a ship sank in the deep sea, we would commit the ship and souls for eternity to the deep – gone forever,’ said David Gallo, director of special projects at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Massachusetts-based research outfit that helped find Air France Flight 447, which disappeared in the mid-Atlantic Ocean in 2009, and is bidding to participate in the Flight 370 hunt. ‘That’s not true anymore.’
But with no hard evidence of where the plane went down, the search will test the recovery industry’s abilities like nothing before. In June, Australian authorities shifted the search zone for a third time – by about 1000 kilometres to the south-west – after reanalysing satellite transmissions. Even then, they said it was impossible to know whether the fresh search area would prove correct.
At stake is the emotional wellbeing of relatives and friends of the passengers from the plane, left in suspended animation while authorities search for answers. There is also the issue of maintaining public trust in the aviation industry, which rarely experiences unsolved disasters.
For its part, Australia has such a visible role because the waters are in a region it handles under a global civil aviation agreement. Under the bidding process, companies angling to play a role in the search can work alone or bid as part of a consortium. Each signed nondisclosure agreements about their bids with the Australian government, but The Wall Street Journal was able to confirm through people familiar with the process at least eight outfits that are bidding for a role.
Among them: Fugro NV, a Dutch oil-and-gas consulting firm that has brought its top subsea sonar guru out of retirement to help with the effort. Others include Oceaneering International Inc., a Houston oil-services firm that makes space suits and robotically controlled amusement park rides, and also helped find the Titanic in 1985.
Then there are the treasure hunters – companies and individuals that make a living exploring the deep for profit. One is Odyssey Marine Explorations Inc., a Florida firm listed on the Nasdaq that a few years ago recovered around $500 million from a Spanish ship sunk off Portugal in 1804.
Others include Williamson & Associates, a Seattle outfit led partly by Art Wright, a well-known underwater explorer who still rows competitively in his 70s. Another is Blue Water Recoveries, a UK firm led by bearded oceanographer David Mearns which holds the Guinness World Record for the deepest wreck ever discovered: a German World War II blockade runner known as Rio Grande, found in 1996 over 5500 metres below the surface.
‘It is definitely the search of my generation,’ said Colleen Keller, a senior analyst at Metron Inc., a Virginia-based scientific consulting firm that also has joined a consortium competing for the Flight 370 contract. Her firm assisted with the Air France search and has also worked with the US Department of Homeland Security.
Efforts to reclaim lost vessels from the depths go back hundreds of years. In 1834, the British warship Royal George was partially salvaged using diving helmets with breathing apparatuses based on a design originally improvised from an old suit of armour and a fire hose.
In the 1930s, a mission was proposed to recover valuables from the torpedoed ocean liner Lusitania using a 60-metre stairwell sealed in an iron tube. While the tube itself was built, the money to search the ship – lying more than 90 metres underwater – ran out. Since then, many divers and documentary crews have reached the wreckage.
Searchers went far deeper in the 1960s and ’70s, when searching equipment improved and military emergencies pushed engineers to stretch their technologies.
In 1966, the US Navy lost a hydrogen bomb in the Mediterranean after a mid-air collision between a B-52 bomber and refuelling plane. Afraid the bomb would fall into the wrong hands, the Navy sought help from Woods Hole scientists who were experimenting with a miniature submarine called Alvin – one of the world’s first deep-sea submersible vehicles. It located the bomb at a depth of about 885 metres.
A few years later, the US Navy spent two years searching for a missing film cache that had fallen back to Earth from a spy satellite. This time, it used a manned submarine developed in-house to recover the film from nearly 5000 metres deep.
Deep-sea searchers soon realised sonar devices, rather than the human eye, allowed for large areas to be quickly assessed for debris, or underwater mines that threatened submarines. Especially useful was side-scan sonar, a technology developed by the US Navy and at research institutes including the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s.
Side-scan sonar works by sending high-powered pulses laterally into the water from a device usually about 45 metres off the seafloor. The pulses hit objects – rocks, debris, mountains, valley walls – and bounce back toward the device, where they are received and integrated into an image that displays a shadow of what is on the bottom of the ocean.
By the 1980s these devices were widely available and robust enough to endure the pressure of deep waters. Treasure hunters, meanwhile, were experimenting with new methods to take cameras and sonar devices deeper.
Ships consigned to oblivion for decades or even centuries were discovered, including the Titanic. It was found in 1985 using a device developed by Woods Hole called the Argo, a towed sled equipped with cameras and strobe lights which fed data back to a ship on a long cable.
Similar sled vehicles fitted with side-scan sonar were used by Williamson & Associates in 1988 to locate the wreck of the SS Central America, or ‘Ship of Gold’, which sank off the coast of the Carolinas during a hurricane in 1857 with up to US$760 million in gold at today’s prices. It caused such a loss to US banks that it helped spark one of the first global financial crises – the Panic of 1857. A diving firm funded by a consortium recently recovered nearly 1000 ounces of gold, but the ship may still have some 16 tonnes remaining.
The technologies also found a market stamping out shippinginsurance swindles. In one case in 1990, a company later acquired by Oceaneering International searched for a cargo ship called the Lucona after it was blown up by an Austrian businessman who later changed his identity with plastic surgery. When he was eventually caught, he goaded investigators to find the missing ship and prove he was guilty – which they did, in waters some 4300 metres deep.
Yet the challenge of locating missing jet aircraft can be far more difficult.
When a plane strikes the water, even in a gentle belly glide, only a few large pieces of debris tend to stay intact. The engines – and their virtually indestructible turbines – snap off and sink to the bottom. Sometimes the cockpit will survive the impact. Much of the rest of the plane usually disintegrates.
On a flat, featureless sea floor, these large pieces of debris send back strong images, known as ‘hard targets’, to a sonar device. But they can easily become camouflaged in rock fields or ravines.
The earlier hunt for Air France Flight 447 illustrates the complexities. Investigators found debris on the ocean surface, giving them a relatively good idea of where the plane went down. But the subsequent search, with contributions from Woods Hole, Metron and Mr Mearns of Blue Water Recoveries, took two more years.
Searchers ruled out areas near the plane’s last communicated location after an undersea pinger locator failed to detect emergency beacon signals there. Instead they relied on complex drift models that tracked movements of debris and bodies found floating on the Atlantic Ocean to determine a probable final location of the plane.
Arguments over the models – which proved wrong – delayed the search for the plane. It eventually was found in the same zone where the pinger locator had originally searched.
With Flight 370, investigators don’t have the benefit of debris or precise final coordinates to give them a starting point. Moreover, the patch of sea they have identified as the plane’s most likely resting place is one of the least-understood places in the world, 1800 kilometres off Western Australia.
The only sonar surveys of the underwate
r topography were taken by boats that passed through the area mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, including a Soviet research vessel called Vityaz that now is a floating museum in Kaliningrad. A core sample of nearby seabed taken by a different Soviet vessel found compact yellow mud made from millions of years of accumulated plankton exoskeletons. Carbon dating showed that it took a thousand years for less than a fifth of an inch of new mud to settle.
Authorities are doing additional mapping of the area with three modern sonar survey ships, including one contracted from Fugro NV. But their equipment operates from the surface, and the images are unlikely to be sharp enough to spot plane debris, instead revealing the lay of the land for the next group of searchers being brought in under the fresh tender.
To find the plane, those searchers will have to use undersea sonar equipment, including side-scan sonars, that can be sent to within 50 metres of the seabed.
Coordinating the search tender from a drab office block in Canberra is the ATSB, and its chief commissioner, Martin Dolan, a long-time public servant who previously ran Australia’s workers’ compensation program. Helping him sift through search bids is a panel of five senior bureaucrats, including a former BP PLC ocean-fleet manager and an ATSB marine engineer.
The decision will ultimately be Mr Dolan’s, and the bidding rules allow him to consider more than merely the lowest bidder. There will be some tough choices, which could be crucial in determining whether contractors fulfil their mission of finding the plane. Among the hardest: whether to bet heavily on companies like Williamson & Associates, which specialises in using relatively simple towed sonars, or outfits like Woods Hole that have their own higher-tech autonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs. A wrong choice could reduce the search’s odds of success.
