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. Increasingly sophisticated dating methods are helping us gain a more accurate understanding of how people came to be in Australia.
For more than 50,000 years before European arrival, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples lived as hunter-gatherers. With no signs of land ownership, such as fences, crops, stock animals, or buildings, the Europeans who arrived on the First Fleet believed the land was free to claim.
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.
They lived in small communities and survived by hunting and gathering. The men would hunt large animals for food and women and children would collect fruit, plants and berries. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island communities only used the land for things that they needed - shelter, water, food, weapons.
Analysis of maternal genetic lineages revealed that Aboriginal populations moved into Australia around 50,000 years ago. They rapidly swept around the west and east coasts in parallel movements - meeting around the Nullarbor just west of modern-day Adelaide.
The Oldest Civilization In The World
Aboriginal Australians became genetically isolated 58,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before other ancestral groups, making them the world's oldest civilization. They then settled in Australia around that time.
A new genomic study has revealed that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest known civilization on Earth, with ancestries stretching back roughly 75,000 years.
Australia is home to the oldest continuing living culture in the entire world. The richness and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures in Australia is something we should all take pride in as a nation.
Australia is made up of many different and distinct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups, each with their own culture, language, beliefs and practices. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
The oldest human remains in Australia were found at Lake Mungo in south-west New South Wales, part of the Willandra Lakes system. This site has been occupied by Aboriginal people from at least 47,000 years ago to the present.
Based on the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) projections, the number of Indigenous Australians in 2021 was estimated to be 881,600. The Indigenous Australian population is projected to reach about 1.1 million people by 2031 (ABS 2019b).
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.
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 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.
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.
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'. It was the English explorer Matthew Flinders who suggested the name we use today.
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.
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.
Archeologists have dated these artefacts to be at least 65,000 years old. The Madjedbebe site revealed that Aboriginal people made and used stone tools, ochre crayons and other pigments. This discovery includes the oldest known examples in the world of the use of the micaceous pigment.
Indigenous people have lived in Australia more than 65,000 years ago, according to scientific evidence of human occupation1. To put this in perspective, this is ten times older than the ancient Egyptian pyramids.
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.
Without access to carbohydrates the population never grew significantly. Language existed as did some pictorial representations but writing never took off. Without farming and its attendant population growth, settlements never developed to become towns or cities. There was no surplus to drive specialisation.
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.
Genetic data confirm that ancient Aborigines and Eurasians left Africa in one single, great wave. Australian Aborigines have long been cast as a people apart.
From at least 60,000 B.C. the area that was to become New South Wales was inhabited entirely by indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with traditional social, legal organisation and land rights.