A NEW STUDY HAS revealed how indigenous Australians coped with the last Ice Age, roughly 20,000 years ago. Researchers say that when the climate cooled dramatically, Aboriginal groups sought refuge in well-watered areas, such as along rivers, and populations were condensed into small habitable areas.
Aboriginal people have been in Australia for between 50,000 and 120,000 years. They were a hunter-gatherer people who had adapted well to the environment.
In order to control heat loss, Aboriginal peoples developed technologies that enabled them to live and thrive in these cooler south-eastern parts of Australia. The most lauded of these technologies are cloaks made from the hides of animals such possums, kangaroos and wallabies.
There are varying estimates for how long Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived on this continent, however, upwards of 60,000 years is what current research reveals.
Evidence from across much of Australia suggests the ice age was arid and windy - in some respects similar to conditions we have seen in recent times – and extended over approximately 200 human generations (about 6,000 years).
During the last Ice Age, Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea formed a single landmass, called Sahul. It was a strange and often hostile place populated by a bizarre cast of giant animals. There were 500-pound kangaroos, marsupial tapirs the size of horses and wombat-like creatures the size of hippos.
Yes, people just like us lived through the ice age. Since our species, Homo sapiens, emerged about 300,000 years ago in Africa, we have spread around the world. During the ice age, some populations remained in Africa and did not experience the full effects of the cold.
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 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.
Sea level was 125 metres lower and, as a consequence the continent was almost 40% larger than it is today . Shifting sand dunes expanded over much of the arid interior, ice caps and glaciers expanded over interior Tasmania, the southern highlands of New South Wales and along the mountainous spine of New Guinea.
20,000 years ago, the world was starting to emerge from the most recent ice age. The sea level around the Australian coast was then about 120 meters lower than it is today. The coastal mountain ranges we see today in north-eastern Australia were further inland.
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.
The Kuku Yalanji people, Australia
Deep in the rainforests of Daintree, North Queensland, you can find one of the oldest civilisations in the world. The Kuku Yalanji people have made the area their home and lived in relative isolation for over 50,000 years!
Australia's first people—known as Aboriginal Australians—have lived on the continent for over 50,000 years. Today, there are 250 distinct language groups spread throughout Australia.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Based on the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) projections, the number of Indigenous Australians in 2021 was estimated to be 881,600.
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.
New University of Melbourne research has revealed that ice ages over the last million years ended when the tilt angle of the Earth's axis was approaching higher values.
Australia and Antarctica were once part of the same land mass — a supercontinent called Gondwana. The fossil record of the 2 continents is similar. Antarctica has fossils of dinosaurs, amphibians and even marsupials from prehistory. Australia began to separate from Antarctica 85 million years ago.
ICE AGE IN AUSTRALIA
During the last Ice Age average temperatures across Australia decreased by 10C, rainfall decreased, and cold, dry winds blew across the land. What was previously a place of plenty, with lots of water and food, became more difficult for the First Nations people.