A new genomic study has revealed that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest known civilization on Earth, with ancestries stretching back roughly 75,000 years.
The findings also show that these Aboriginal ancestors remained almost entirely isolated until around 4,000 years ago. [Australian Aboriginal people] are probably the oldest group in the world that you can link to one particular place.
An unprecedented DNA study has found evidence of a single human migration out of Africa and confirmed that Aboriginal Australians are the world's oldest civilization.
Aboriginal people are known to have occupied mainland Australia for at least 65,000 years. It is widely accepted that this predates the modern human settlement of Europe and the Americas.
It is true that there has been, historically, a small number of claims that there were people in Australia before Australian Aborigines, but these claims have all been refuted and are no longer widely debated.
Total brain volume was significantly smaller for Aborigines (1199 +/- 84 ml) compared to Caucasians (1386 +/- 98 ml). Significantly smaller volumes were also found for cerebellum, prosencephalon-mesencephalon unit, cerebral cortex, frontal cortex, parieto-occipitotemporal cortex, and hippocampus.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
Those Aboriginal tribes who lived inland in the bush and the desert lived by hunting and gathering, burning the undergrowth to encourage the growth of plants favoured by the game they hunted. They were experts in seeking out water.
Aboriginal peoples
The earliest anatomically modern human remains found in Australia (and outside of Africa) are those of Mungo Man; they have been dated at 42,000 years old.
The only historical evidence of Mr Stewart's age is an engraving on an old windmill at Wallal Downs Station, about 300 kilometres south of Broome. The rusted iron is marked "Stephen Stewart, 1918", making Mr Stewart at least 103.
Aboriginal Australians could be the oldest population of humans living outside of Africa, where one theory says they migrated from in boats 70,000 years ago. Australia's first people—known as Aboriginal Australians—have lived on the continent for over 50,000 years.
Traces of this lineage that are manifest in many Aboriginal fossils and many of the modern people include the more rugged bones and the huge, thick skulls with big brow ridges, wide noses, flat foreheads and massive projecting faces.
Studies regarding the genetic make-up of Aboriginal groups are still ongoing, but evidence has suggested that they have genetic inheritance from ancient Asian but not more modern peoples, share some similarities with Papuans, but have been isolated from Southeast Asia for a very long time.
“All indigenous haplogroups were found to be ancient, with estimated ages greater than 40 thousand years, and all were widespread throughout the continent.”
Stone tools vs agriculture
In Australia, “Stone Age” was seen not as a technology practised by Aboriginal people, but rather as the essence of what they were. “Stone Age” people were assumed to have no system of land tenure.
They conclude that, like most other living Eurasians, Aborigines descend from a single group of modern humans who swept out of Africa 50,000 to 60,000 years ago and then spread in different directions.
In 1803, British colonisation began and in 1876, Truganini died. She was the last full-blood and tribal Tasmanian Aboriginal. Within her one lifetime, a whole society and culture were removed from the face of the earth.
In Australian Aboriginal mythology, Baiame (or Biame, Baayami, Baayama or Byamee) was the creator god and sky father in the Dreaming of several Aboriginal Australian peoples of south-eastern Australia, such as the Wonnarua, Kamilaroi, Guringay, Eora, Darkinjung, and Wiradjuri peoples.
Earth's oldest known piece of continental crust dates to the era of the moon's formation. Australia holds the oldest continental crust on Earth, researchers have confirmed, hills some 4.4 billion years old.
After European settlers arrived in 1788, thousand of aborigines died from diseases; colonists systematically killed many others. At first contact, there were over 250,000 aborigines in Australia. The massacres ended in the 1920 leaving no more than 60,000.
Aboriginal people have been in Australia for at least 60,000 years (Torres Strait Islanders at least 2500 years).
There is no one Aboriginal word that all Aborigines use for Australia; however, today they call Australia, ""Australia"" because that is what it is called today. There are more than 250 aboriginal tribes in Australia. Most of them didn't have a word for ""Australia""; they just named places around them.
It is generally held that Australian Aboriginal peoples originally came from Asia via insular Southeast Asia (now Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, and the Philippines) and have been in Australia for at least 45,000–50,000 years.
Prior to that time, were 1,000-pound kangaroos in Australia, 2-ton wombats, 25-foot-long lizards, 400-pound flightless birds, 300-pound marsupial lions and Volkswagen-sized tortoises. After that time, those huge creatures had disappeared.
From at least 60,000 B.C. the area that was to become New South Wales was inhabited entirely by indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with traditional social, legal organisation and land rights.