Both Aboriginal oral histories and the archaeological record shows the Chinese drove Australia's first global trade in the Asia-Pacific well before the first fleet's arrival. Oral histories tell of direct contact between Chinese and Yolngu people.
Makasar traded with Aboriginal people for trepang (sea cucumber), which they boiled down, dried on their boats and traded with China where it is still used for food and medicine. The Makasar did not settle in Arnhem Land but they did have an influence on the Yolŋu people's society and ritual.
In a book titled 1421: The Year China Discovered the World Gavin Menzies claims that in the 1420's several fleets of Chinese ships sailed around the world, making contact with many countries before Europeans explored them, including Australia.
The Macassans fished for trepang or employed Aboriginal people to do so. 8 They traded goods with Aboriginal people, and traded the trepang across Indonesia and mainland China. Some Macassans lived with local inhabitants. They built temporary structures to process the trepang but no permanent dwellings.
Studies of Aboriginal groups' genetic makeup are ongoing, but evidence suggests that they have genetic inheritance from ancient Asian but not more modern peoples, and share some similarities with Papuans, but have been isolated from Southeast Asia for a very long time.
Aboriginal origins
Humans are thought to have migrated to Northern Australia from Asia using primitive boats. A current theory holds that those early migrants themselves came out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, which would make Aboriginal Australians the oldest population of humans living outside Africa.
A new genomic study has revealed that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest known civilization on Earth, with ancestries stretching back roughly 75,000 years.
' Between 1606 and 1756 there were four known Dutch voyages in which a total of eight ships sailed along the North Queensland coast and made contact with the Aborigines. These encounters with the Aborigines were frequent and often resulted in violent conflict.
Humans moved from Southeast Asia onto this landmass, some settling in what is now New Guinea, others traveling farther south into Australia. They kept to the coastlines until they reached southern Australia 49,000 years ago.
Aboriginal peoples
Several settlements of humans in Australia have been dated around 49,000 years ago. Luminescence dating of sediments surrounding stone artefacts at Madjedbebe, a rock shelter in northern Australia, indicates human activity at 65,000 years BP.
The very early history of Chinese Australians involved significant immigration from villages of the Pearl River Delta in South China, with most such immigrants speaking dialects within the Yue dialect group. The Gold rushes lured many Chinese to the Australian colonies in the 19th century.
The Chinese immigrants referred to the Australian gold fields as 'Xin Jin Shan', or New Gold Mountain.
By the early 1850s, news of a gold rush in Australia had reached southern China, sparking an influx in Chinese migration to Australia. It is thought that approximately 7000 Chinese people came to work at the Araluen gold fields in southern NSW.
Following the failure of the Gove lands rights case, the Whitlam Labor Government instigated an inquiry into Aboriginal land rights (known as the Woodward Commission), which eventually led to the Fraser Liberal government passing the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.
Aboriginal land was taken over by British colonists on the premise that the land belonged to no-one ('terra nullius'). The history of Aboriginal dispossession is central to understanding contemporary Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relations.
Author: Anita Heiss. In 1770 Captain James Cook met few Aboriginal people on the Eastern Australian shoreline. Because they did not grow crops and because he assumed there were no inland fishable rivers, he concluded that Australia's interior was empty.
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. The overwhelming weight of evidence supports the idea that Aboriginal people were the first Australians.
Some are near-white like the F1; but none darker than either parent have been seen. Study of the various crosses leads to the conclusion that a single main gene for melanin in the skin is present in the aborigines, together with a minor gene which alone produces brunet-white skin colour.
“An Australian Aboriginal genome does not exist and therefore to even propose that a test is possible is scientifically inaccurate,” Ms Jenkins said. “The two companies which currently offer this 'service' use sections of DNA called single tandem repeats (STRs) that vary in the number of copies each person has.
The first genome analysis of an Aborigine reveals that these early Australians took part in the first human migration out of Africa. They were the first to arrive in Asia some 70,000 years ago, roaming the area at least 24,000 years before the ancestors of present-day Europeans and Asians.
The first European Australians came from United Kingdom and Ireland. The First white child born in New South Wales was Rebecca Small (22 September 1789 – 30 January 1883), was born in Port Jackson, the eldest daughter of John Small a boatswain in the First Fleet which arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788.
While Indigenous Australians have inhabited the continent for tens of thousands of years, and traded with nearby islanders, the first documented landing on Australia by a European was in 1606. The Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon landed on the western side of Cape York Peninsula and charted about 300 km of coastline.
The closest individual and therefore the most similar to the "perfect genome" is an individual that corresponds to a Puerto Rican woman, and we can relate it to the Taino India known as Yuiza.
Yes, the first humans were almost certainly black. The human species evolved in East Africa about 200,000 years ago. Black skin was necessary for survival in this hot and sunny climate.