The Lake Mungo remains are three important sets of human remains that belong to Aboriginal Australians: Lake Mungo 1 (also called Mungo Woman, LM1, and ANU-618), Lake Mungo 3 (also called Mungo Man, Lake Mungo III, and LM3), and Lake Mungo 2 (LM2). Lake Mungo is located in New South Wales, Australia, within the World Heritage listed Willandra Lakes Region. Mungo Woman (LM1) was found in 1968 and is one of the world’s oldest known cremations.
Lascaux Cave, located near the village of Montignac in the Dordogne department of southwestern France, is a group of caves. More than 600 wall paintings cover the walls and ceilings inside the cave. The paintings mostly show large animals that lived in the area during the Upper Paleolithic period, as shown by the fossils found there.
Shanidar Cave is an archaeological site located on Bradost Mountain in the Zagros Mountains within the Erbil Governorate of the Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq. Neanderthal remains were found here in 1953, including Shanidar 1, who lived with several injuries, possibly because others in his group helped him, and Shanidar 4, a famous but not certain “flower burial,” where pollen has been suggested to be the remains of flowers placed there on purpose. Before this discovery, Cro-Magnons, the earliest known humans in Europe, were the only group known to perform burials with purpose or rituals.
The Spirit Cave mummy is the oldest human mummy found in North America. It was discovered in 1940 in Spirit Cave, 13 miles (21 km) east of Fallon, Nevada, United States, by Sydney and Georgia Wheeler, a husband-and-wife archaeological team. Studies of the remains showed similarities to indigenous peoples from North and South America.
The Red “Lady” of Paviland (Welsh: “Dynes” Goch Pafiland) is a partial male skeleton covered in red ochre. It was buried in Wales about 34,000 years ago, around 32,000 BCE. The bones were discovered in 1823 by William Buckland during an archaeological dig at Goat’s Hole Cave (Paviland Cave).
The Urfa man, also called the Balıklıgöl statue, is an ancient statue shaped like a human. It was discovered during excavations in Balıklıgöl, near Urfa, in the area of Upper Mesopotamia, which is in the southeast of modern-day Turkey. The statue dates back to around 9000 BC and belongs to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period.
The Taş Tepeler, which means “Stone Mounds” in Turkish, are a group of ancient archaeological sites in Upper Mesopotamia (also called al-Jazira), near the city of Urfa in modern-day Turkey. These sites are the remains of settlements from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) period, around 10,000 to 7000 BC. They show the shift from people who moved around and gathered food to those who stayed in one place and farmed.
Çatalhöyük (also called Çatal Höyük and Çatal Hüyük) is a large mound formed by people living there for a long time. It is a Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement in southern Anatolia, built between about 7500 BC and 5600 BC, and it was most active around 7000 BC. It is located near the Konya Plain, southeast of the modern city of Konya (ancient Iconium) in Turkey, about 140 km (87 miles) from Mount Hasan, a twin-coned volcano.
Mehrgarh is an ancient archaeological site located in the Kacchi Plain area of Balochistan, Pakistan. It is near the Bolan Pass, west of the Indus River, and between the modern cities of Quetta, Kalat, and Sibi. The site was discovered in 1974 by a French team studying the Indus Basin, led by archaeologists Jean-François Jarrige and Catherine Jarrige.
Mohenjo-daro is an archaeological site located in the Larkana District of Sindh, Pakistan. It was built around 2500 BCE and was one of the largest cities of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization. This city was among the earliest major cities in the world and existed around the same time as ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Minoa, and Norte Chico.