Aboriginal people have been in Australia for at least 60,000 years (Torres Strait Islanders at least 2500 years). It is only in the past 500 years there has been European contact with Australia and the Torres Strait. 1606 - The Spaniard, Vaez de Torres has explored the Strait which today bears his name.
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.
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. The population of New South Wales was at least 100,000 with many tribal, clan and language groups.
A cumulative population of 1.6 billion people has been estimated to have lived in Australia over 65,000 years prior to British colonisation.
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.
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 Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, there are. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia are the indigenous people who have lived on the continent for tens of thousands of years. While the majority of Aboriginal Australians have some European ancestry, there are still many who identify as full-blooded Aboriginal.
Australian Prehistory: Humans are thought to have arrived in Australia about 30,000 years ago. The original inhabitants, who have descendants to this day, are known as aborigines.
In 1606, the crew of Dutch VOC vessel Duyfken, under the command of captain Willem Janszoon, made landfall near Mapoon, on the Cape York Peninsula, and constituted the first recorded contact on Australian soil between the Indigenous people of Australia and Europeans.
The first known landing in Australia by Europeans was in 1606 by Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon on Australia's northern coast. Later that year, Spanish explorer Luís Vaz de Torres sailed through, and navigated, what is now called Torres Strait and associated islands.
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.
There is a problem with this story, namely that there is no evidence from the archaeological and biological records that a pygmy population ever existed in Australia or any people prior to Aboriginal people (1). So then why does this myth exist and persist?
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.