The Last Glacial Maximum Human Burial from Liang Lemdubu in Northern Sahulland

The one metre square test pit (Test Pit C) excavated by O’Connor, Spriggs and Veth at the Liang Lemdubu site, Aru, recovered a semi-complete human skeleton. When alive, the individual (‘Lemdubu Woman’) had been a tall woman of around 166cm in height, with a rugged skull and quite large teeth by female standards (Fig. 12.1). Age at death is estimated at around 30 years old based on the morphology of the pubic symphysis and stage of tooth wear. The vertebral discs, right tibia and right clavicle present a series of holes which are suggestive of metastatic lesions. All parts of the skeleton are definitely represented except the fingers and toes. The bulk of the material was recovered within the cramped depth of 30cm between Spits 18 and 23, and the remains include tilted and vertically inverted elements. These observations are incompatible with a standard primary burial and, in the most likely scenario, the corpse had decomposed to a state of bones and connective tissue which had then been buried in bundles. As discussed in Chapter 9 (this volume), the age of the burial would be placed at around 16,000–18,000 years ago based on its stratigraphic context and ESR dating of its tooth from Spit 19, but we also have a conflicting, middle Holocene chronometric determination on the bone. Although for the reasons outlined in Chapter 9 the bone date has been dismissed as unreliable, it was thought that for the sake of completeness Lemdubu Woman should be compared with both Pleistocene and Holocene aged skeletal materials. The two very different estimates of the skeleton’s age would imply either a similarity with terminal Pleistocene Australian female specimens, such as those from Coobool Creek in southeast Australia, or an affinity with middle Holocene Nusatenggara female specimens such as Leang Toge (see Fig. 12.2). Few morphological comparisons support the latter alternative and, instead, a diagnostic likeness clearly emerges with ancient Australians. The Lemdubu burial should therefore be considered representative of the Last Glacial Maximum inhabitants of the northwestern rim of the The Last Glacial Maximum Human Burial from Liang Lemdubu in Northern Sahulland