Of all the countries included in the report, China has the highest number of Indigenous, with an estimated population of 125.3 million.
Where Aboriginal people live. Contrary to what many people think (and to the stereotype of Australian advertising) the majority of Aboriginal people live in Australia's eastern states and not in the remote desert regions of the continent. Most Aboriginal people livein New South Wales and Queensland.
New South Wales
One-third (32.7%) of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in NSW lived in Greater Sydney in 2021.
There are 476 million Indigenous people around the world and spread across more than 90 countries. They belong to more than 5,000 different Indigenous peoples and speak more than 4,000 languages. Indigenous people represent about 5% of the world's population. The vast majority of them – 70% – live in Asia.
Key statistics
As at 30 June 2021 there were 984,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, representing 3.8% of the total Australian population. This is an increase of 185,600 people (23.2%) since 30 June 2016.
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 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.
The largest of the First Nations groups is the Cree, which includes some 120,000 people. In Canada the word Indian has a legal definition given in the Indian Act of 1876. People legally defined as Indians are known as status Indians.
The figure shows that in 2022, the highest proportion of Indigenous Australians lived in New South Wales (33.2%), followed by Queensland (28.2%) and Western Australia (12.5%).
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.
Between 11,000 and 14,000 Aboriginal people died, compared with only 399 to 440 colonisers. The tallies of the dead are not the only measure of what took place, according to Dr Bill Pascoe, a digital humanities specialist and key researcher on the project. “We are always using conservative estimates,” Pascoe said.
Genetic studies have revealed that Aboriginal Australians largely descended from an Eastern Eurasian population wave, and are most closely related to other Oceanians, such as Melanesians.
Prehistory. 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.
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 largest Aboriginal communities – the Pitjantjatjara, the Arrernte, the Luritja and the Warlpiri – are all from Central Australia. Throughout the history of the continent, there have been many different Aboriginal groups, each with its own individual language, culture, and belief structure.
There are 468000 Aboriginals in total in Australia in which 99 percent of them are mixed blooded and 1 percent of them are full blooded.
In the 1860s, Victoria became the first state to pass laws authorising Aboriginal children to be removed from their parents. Similar policies were later adopted by other states and territories – and by the federal government when it was established in the 1900s.
The largest ethnic group is the Han (91.6), and the largest non-Han minority groups are Tibetans, Mongols, and Uyghurs. These territories (Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang) are resource-rich and these ethnic groups often dispute the autonomous regions.
Common historical continuity
There are over 476 million indigenous people living in 90 countries across the world, accounting for 6.2 per cent of the global population. Of those, there are more than 5,000 distinct groups. Indigenous people speak an overwhelming majority of the world's estimated 7,000 languages.
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.
After Dutch navigators charted the northern, western and southern coasts of Australia during the 17th Century this newly found continent became known as 'New Holland'.
The First Fleet of British ships arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788 to establish a penal colony, the first colony on the Australian mainland.