About 90% of Aboriginal communities today speak languages belonging to the “Pama-Nyungan” linguistic family. The study finds that all of these people are descendants of the founding population which diverged from the Papuans 37,000 years ago, then diverged further into genetically isolated communities.
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.
We show that Aboriginal Australians are descendants of an early human dispersal into eastern Asia, possibly 62,000 to 75,000 years ago. This dispersal is separate from the one that gave rise to modern Asians 25,000 to 38,000 years ago.
Genetically, while Aboriginal Australians are most closely related to Melanesian and Papuan people, there is also another component that could indicate South Asian admixture or more recent European influence.
Surprisingly, Papuans and Aboriginal Australians appear to have diverged from each other at least 25,000 years ago, even though the landmasses of Australia and New Guinea were only separated by rising sea levels less than 10,000 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.
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.
These populations diverged from each other around 36,000 years ago, suggesting that they all descended from an early southward migration out of Africa. But Pugach also found evidence of more recent gene flow from India and northern Australia, which took place around 141 generations ago.
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.
Results: The Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal populations had significantly different ABO and RhD distributions (P < 0.001). For Aboriginal individuals, 955/1686 (56.6%) were group O and 669/1686 (39.7%) were group A. In non-Aboriginal individuals, 1201/2657 (45.2%) were group O and 986/2657 (37.1%) were group A.
Far more Australians are descended from assisted immigrants than from convicts, the majority of Colonial Era settlers being British and Irish. About 20 percent of Australians are descendants of convicts. Most of the first Australian settlers came from London, the Midlands and the North of England, and Ireland.
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.
“All indigenous haplogroups were found to be ancient, with estimated ages greater than 40 thousand years, and all were widespread throughout the continent.”
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Wide nostrils of the aborigines again appear to depend on a small number of additive genes compared with the narrow nose of the white man. The lips of the aborigines tend to be thick throughout, but generally not everted.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
There are 5000 of them left. There are 468000 Aboriginals in total in Australia in which 99 percent of them are mixed blooded and 1 percent of them are full blooded.
They also found a distinct genetic link between the Neanderthal blood types and those of an Aboriginal Australian and an indigenous Papuan, suggesting modern humans mated with Neanderthals before they migrated to Southeast Asia.
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.
Thus it appears that both sexes of the two regions, the desert and the coastal, of the present study fall within the range of variation of hair forms of the Australian aborigines. Campbell et al. (1936-37) found curly hair with a frequency of 7.89%.
Traces of this lineage that are manifest in many Aboriginal fossils and many of the modern people include the more rugged bones and the huge, thick skulls with big brow ridges, wide noses, flat foreheads and massive projecting faces.