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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed, by 31,000 years ago, most Aboriginal communities were genetically isolated from each other. This divergence was most likely caused by environmental barriers; in particular the evolution of an almost impassable central desert as the Australian continent dried out.
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.
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 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.
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.
From then until the 18th-century arrival of European colonists, aboriginal Australians did not mix their DNA with anyone else in the world — or so many scientists believed. Now a study has turned up evidence of much more recent interbreeding between native Australians and people who came from India.
The indigenous people of Africa are groups of people native to a specific region; people who lived there before colonists or settlers arrived, defined new borders, and began to occupy the land. This definition applies to all indigenous groups, whether inside or outside of Africa.
Australia was once part of a much larger land mass called Gondwana, which included the modern continents of Africa, South America, Antarctica and India.
A new genetic study suggests all modern humans trace our ancestry to a single spot in southern Africa 200,000 years ago.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
Results: The Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal populations had significantly different ABO and RhD distributions (P < 0.001). For Aboriginal individuals, 955/1686 (56.6%) were group O and 669/1686 (39.7%) were group A. In non-Aboriginal individuals, 1201/2657 (45.2%) were group O and 986/2657 (37.1%) were group A.
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.
These populations diverged from each other around 36,000 years ago, suggesting that they all descended from an early southward migration out of Africa. But Pugach also found evidence of more recent gene flow from India and northern Australia, which took place around 141 generations ago.
Aboriginal people can be dark-skinned and broad-nosed, or blonde-haired and blue-eyed. Let's get rid of some myths!
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.