LACROSSE – Aboriginal people played hundreds of outdoor team sports. Lacrosse is a team sport invented by Aboriginal people, which many believe is the forerunner to hockey. SNOWSHOES – Aboriginal people developed technology for travel over snow. Many kinds of snowshoes were developed by Aboriginal people.
The spearthrower (known in some parts of Australia as the woomera) is a unique Aboriginal invention. It was designed to increase greatly the distance a spear could be thrown, acting as a first order lever.
The fact that Aboriginal cultures 'never invented the wheel' is misunderstood by many people, and is often used to argue that Aboriginal cultures are 'primitive', rather than understanding that Aboriginal cultures were not further behind on a single path of progress, but were on an entirely different path altogether.
The traditional owners of the land which archaeological evidence confirms is the oldest continuous civilisation on earth, extending back over 65,000 years. They were among the first humans to migrate out of Africa, across the coastlines of India and Asia until reaching the shores of Australia.
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.
The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
The culture of Australia's Aboriginal people is one of the oldest in the world – Aboriginal Australian Culture dates back more than 60,000 years! There are many archaeological sites throughout the country where the long history of Indigenous people can be found.
Aboriginal Australians have lived in the Northern Territory for more than 65,000 years. It is the oldest continuous culture on earth.
Australia's Aborigines are one of the most diverse and mysterious civilizations in the world. They are the Earth's most ancient culture and make up an important piece of Australian— and human— history.
The didgeridoo was developed by Aboriginal peoples of northern Australia at least 1,000 years ago, and is now in use around the world, though still most strongly associated with Indigenous Australian music.
They have been observing, experimenting and documenting the physical world around them and the consequences of their interactions for as long as they have been doing so. They indeed could be considered the world's first scientists – just not in the way the scientific community were taught to consider it.
Aboriginal peoples
Genetic studies appear to support an arrival date of 50–70,000 years ago. 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.
Boomerangs Were Lethal Weapons of War, Skeleton Suggests. Aboriginal peoples relied on boomerangs like these for hunting, digging, and other purposes. Special "war boomerangs" with an extra-sharp inner edge were deployed for fighting.
They argue that the first Australians had complex systems of agriculture that went far beyond the hunter-gatherer tag. They were, in fact, our first farmers, whose intimate knowledge of managing native plants and animals sustained them for thousands of years.
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.
The new data reveals a number of interesting findings. On the grand scale and going as far back in time as to shortly after modern humans migrated out of Africa the DNA-sequences show that together the Aboriginal Australians and Papuans split from Europeans and Asians about 58,000 years ago.
Genetics. 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.
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.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders: Australia's First Peoples.
All living Aboriginal Australians descend from a single founding population that arrived about 50,000 years ago, the study shows. They swept around the continent, along the coasts, in a matter of centuries.
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.
In an analysis by Guardian Australia based on the data, Aboriginal deaths were estimated to be 27 to 33 times higher than coloniser deaths. Between 11,000 and 14,000 Aboriginal people died, compared with only 399 to 440 colonisers.
In Australia, 812,000 people identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander in the 2021 Census of Population and Housing. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people represented 3.2% of the population.