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. Along with their genes, the migrants also have brought more advanced tool-making techniques and the ancestors of the dingo.
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.
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.
Outside of Africa, Australia holds some of modern humans' earliest archeological evidence, with relics dating back to about 45,000 years ago.
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.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders: Australia's First Peoples.
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.
She estimates that the Indians contributed nearly 10% to the Australian Aboriginal genomes. Co-author of the research, Irina Pugach, estimates that ancient Indians came to Australia around 2,300 BC - approximately 141 generations ago.
Getting back to the Australian aborigines, separate research has shown that they have roughly the same Neanderthal DNA component as non-Africans, which indicates they split off after at least the first interbreeding between the two species.
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. Along with their genes, the migrants also have brought more advanced tool-making techniques and the ancestors of the dingo.
The Aborigines are thus direct descendants of the first modern humans to leave Africa, without any genetic mixture from other races so far as can be seen at present.
A new genomic study has revealed that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest known civilization on Earth, with ancestries stretching back roughly 75,000 years.
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 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.
Aboriginal Australians have lived in the Northern Territory for more than 65,000 years. It is the oldest continuous culture on earth.
First Nations Australians are often called Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. But there is significant diversity within these two groups. There is a wide range of nations, cultures and languages across mainland Australia and throughout the Torres Strait.
In Aboriginal individuals we found that group O was more common than A in the 'Northern' NT, whereas there was similar distribution of the groups in 'Central Australia'. Conclusions: We found a significant difference in ABO and RhD blood groups between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals in the NT (P < 0.001).
Aboriginal people in Australia contain both Neanderthal DNA, as do most humans, and Denisovan DNA. This latter genetic trace is present in Aboriginal people at the present day in much greater quantities than any other people around the world.
It's possible, depending on how distant the Indigenous Australian ancestor is, that you share too little DNA with them for our DNA test to detect it. A DNA test is not any kind of prescription of identity; rather, a person's genetic makeup is only one part of their story.
The tribes in south India and Sri Lanka are genetically closer to one another than to the Aboriginals in southeast Asia and Oceania. Despite their morphological similarity there is no genetic evidence to suggest that the Indian tribes and Australian Aboriginals are biologically related.
According to Australian records, a small group of Indians arrived in Australia in the years 1800-1816, sent as convict labourers by British colonial authorities.
Between 1800 and 1860, Indians were brought to Australia to work as labourers and domestic workers. From 1860 to 1901 many Indians arrived to work as agricultural labourers and hawkers, particularly in country towns. A number also worked in the goldfields.
The oldest human fossil remains found in Australia date to around 40,000 years ago – 20,000 years after the earliest archaeological evidence of human occupation. Nothing is known about the physical appearance of the first humans that entered the continent about 50,000 years ago.
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.
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.