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.
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.
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.
Some 90% of present-day Australian Aboriginals belong to the Pama-Nyungan linguistic family. This family originated only around 6,000 years ago, but according to the new study the people who speak the Pama-Nyungan languages today started to become genetically differentiated in Australia as early as 31,000 years ago.
The aboriginal skin, which is normally reddish mahogany or chocolate brown (not black, except perhaps in some northern tribes), is very subject to tanning (see Fig.
The original Australians were dark-skinned, but a large proportion of the country's Aborigines today are of mixed blood, and many appear to be white.
The First Nations people of Australia consist of two culturally distinct Indigenous groups of black people, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, born inher- itors and custodians of the land.
Australia's first car race winner, James Robert Crooke, staged and then won, Australia's first motor race on 12 March 1904, on the horse racing track at Sandown Park, Melbourne,Victoria, Australia.
“All indigenous haplogroups were found to be ancient, with estimated ages greater than 40 thousand years, and all were widespread throughout the continent.”
Willerslev and his colleagues found that individual Aboriginals from different parts of Australia could be as genetically distinct from one another as Europeans are from East Asians. This points to a long, long period of separation — tens of thousands of years living on opposite sides of massive deserts.
About 85 - 90% of the population identifies as ethnically White, but this is actually a compilation of several ethnic categories. Around 25% identify as White Australian, while 26% identify as English, and the rest are a mixture of various European ethnicities ranging from Dutch to Greek.
Flow of genes suggests continent was not isolated after all. Northern Aboriginal Australians can trace as much as 11% of their genomes to migrants who reached the island around 4,000 years ago from India, a new study suggests.
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.
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 first settlement, at Sydney, consisted of about 850 convicts and their Marine guards and officers, led by Governor Arthur Phillip. They arrived at Botany Bay in the "First Fleet" of 9 transport ships accompanied by 2 small warships, in January, 1788.
Their dark skin reflects an African origin and a migration and residence in latitudes near the equator, unlike Europeans and Asians whose ancestors gained the paler skin necessary for living in northern latitudes.
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.
People who identify themselves as 'Aboriginal' range from dark-skinned, broad-nosed to blonde-haired, blue-eyed people. Aboriginal people define Aboriginality not by skin colour but by relationships. Light-skinned Aboriginal people often face challenges on their Aboriginal identity because of stereotyping.
However, Dr Misty Jenkins, who leads the Division of Immunology lab at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, said the ability to test DNA for Aboriginal genealogy does not exist.
Aboriginal people can be dark-skinned and broad-nosed, or blonde-haired and blue-eyed. Let's get rid of some myths!
(The native people of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, have some of the darkest skin pigmentation in the world.) Although these people are widely separated they share similar physical environments.
We don't have recessive genes for our skin colour, so there is no 'throwback' for it among us (unlike red hair, which pops up every second or third generation). An Aboriginal baby is never browner than the darker-skinned parent. Indigenous people in Australia come in all colours of the rainbow in their complexions.
The word “Aboriginal” was a replacement for “Indian” and “Native”. “Indigenous” is becoming the most accepted word. The word “Indian” will remain ingrained in Canadian Law and History. Status Indigenous peoples are referred to in the Indian Act 1876 as Indians.