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 findings have been published in the Journal of Human Genetics. Dr John Mitchell from La Trobe's Department of Biochemistry and Genetics, who led the study, said the research revealed there was a high level of genetic diversity among Aboriginal Australians.
If you receive the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander region in your DNA results, this tells you that you probably had an ancestor who was an Indigenous Australian. If you are Indigenous Australian and do not receive this region in your DNA results, this should not subtract from your identity in any way.
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.
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.
By comparing Aboriginal genomes to other groups, they conclude that Aborigines diverged from Eurasians between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, after the whole group had already split from Africans.
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.
A new genomic study has revealed that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest known civilization on Earth, with ancestries stretching back roughly 75,000 years.
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.
Some 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 study suggests. Along with their genes, the migrants brought different tool-making techniques and the ancestors of the dingo, researchers say.
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).
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.
The ONLY, effective and accurate way to identify someone of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander origin is to ask the question. “Are you of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander origin?”
Aboriginal people are also genetically closer to Asians (Cambodian, Japanese, Han, and Dai) than Europeans (French). These findings suggest that before invasion Aboriginal people and Papua New Guinean Highlands people were genetically isolated from other populations, but not necessarily from each other.
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.
One Nation NSW has proposed to abolish self-identification and introduce a “new system” relying on DNA ancestry testing with a result requiring a finding of at least 25 per cent "Indigenous" before First Nations identification is accepted.
“An Australian Aboriginal genome does not exist and therefore to even propose that a test is possible is scientifically inaccurate,” Ms Jenkins said. “The two companies which currently offer this 'service' use sections of DNA called single tandem repeats (STRs) that vary in the number of copies each person has.
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.
At the 2021 census, the number of ancestry responses within each standardised group as a proportion of the total population was as follows: 57.2% European (including 46% North-West European and 11.2% Southern and Eastern European), 33.8% (including 29.9% Australian) Oceanian, 17.4% Asian (including 6.5% Southern and ...
Yes, the first humans were almost certainly black. The human species evolved in East Africa about 200,000 years ago. Black skin was necessary for survival in this hot and sunny climate.
Modern humans originated in Africa within the past 200,000 years and evolved from their most likely recent common ancestor, Homo erectus, which means 'upright man' in Latin. Homo erectus is an extinct species of human that lived between 1.9 million and 135,000 years ago.
The First Humans
One of the earliest known humans is Homo habilis, or “handy man,” who lived about 2.4 million to 1.4 million years ago in Eastern and Southern Africa.
The extensive study of Aboriginal people's DNA dates their origins to more than 50,000 years ago and shows that their ancestors were probably the first humans to journey across Asia and cross an ocean. The findings also show that these Aboriginal ancestors remained almost entirely isolated until around 4,000 years ago.
Ancestral Beings are supernatural and creator beings who travelled across the unshaped world in both human and non-human form, shaping the landscape, creating people and laying down laws of social and religious behaviour. The Dreaming is infinite and links the past to the present and determines the future.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders: Australia's First Peoples.