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 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.
The Australian Government defines Indigenous Australians as people who: are of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent; identify as being of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander origin; and are accepted as such in the communities in which they live or have lived.
Paleogeneticists realized about 10 years ago that most Europeans and Asians inherited 1% to 2% of their genomes from Neanderthals. And Melanesians and Australian Aboriginals get another 3% to 6% of their DNA from Denisovans, Neanderthal cousins who ranged across Asia 50,000 to 200,000 years ago or so.
Getting back to the Australian aborigines, separate research has shown that they have roughly the same Neanderthal DNA component as non-Africans, which indicates they split off after at least the first interbreeding between the two species.
A new genomic study has revealed that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest known civilization on Earth, with ancestries stretching back roughly 75,000 years.
Aboriginal Australians and Papuans later diverged c. 37,000 years ago, long before the physical separation of Australia and New Guinea, some 10,000 years ago. These people, coming from mainland Asia and travelling into Australia, were the ancestors of most if not all modern day Australians.
Denisovans are close relatives of both modern humans and Neanderthals, and likely diverged from these lineages around 300,000 to 400,000 years ago; they are more closely related to Neanderthals than to modern humans.
This information is generally reported as a percentage that suggests how much DNA an individual has inherited from these ancestors. The percentage of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans is zero or close to zero in people from African populations, and is about 1 to 2 percent in people of European or Asian background.
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 DNA sequences showed that the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans had then split from Europeans and Asians by at least 51,000 years ago. By comparison, the ancestors of Europeans and Asians only became genetically distinct from each other roughly 10,000 years later.
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.
She estimates that the Indians contributed nearly 10% to the Australian Aboriginal genomes. Co-author of the research, Irina Pugach, estimates that ancient Indians came to Australia around 2,300 BC - approximately 141 generations ago.
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.
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 original inhabitants of Australia were known as the Aborigines. They were the indigenous people of mainland Australia.
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.
The first humans to leave Africa 40,000 years ago are believed to have had dark skin, which would have been advantageous in sunny climates. But humans did not uniformly develop light skin when they reached the colder regions of Europe.
Africans have more genetic variation than anyone else on Earth, according to a new study that helps narrow the location where humans first evolved, probably near the South Africa-Namibia border.
The Neanderthals interbred with modern humans in Middle East between 47,000 and 65,000 years ago before disappearing 40,000 years ago. Thus, some Iranians have much more Neanderthal DNA than people in other countries.
Humans first evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent. The fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa. Most scientists currently recognize some 15 to 20 different species of early humans.
We find that Middle Eastern populations have very little Neanderthal DNA that is private to the region, with the vast majority shared with other Eurasians.
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.
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 ...
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