An arid assembly of lakebeds that dried up around 18,500 years ago in remote New South Wales, the Willandra Lakes Region has yielded invaluable insight into early human history. The area encompasses Lake Mungo National Park, where the partially-cremated remains of a woman and an almost complete skeleton of a man from the Pleistocene era – the period when humans evolved into their present form, homo sapiens – were found here in the 1960s and 1970s.

The scorched site also includes the world's largest collection of fossilised human footprints (460 of them), as well as fossils of giant marsupials.

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