Australia is made up of many different and distinct
Lake Mungo. The oldest human remains in Australia were found at Lake Mungo in south-west New South Wales, part of the Willandra Lakes system. This site has been occupied by Aboriginal people from at least 47,000 years ago to the present.
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 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.
Aboriginal Land
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.
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.
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.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
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 Australians are the various First Nations peoples of the Australian mainland and many of its islands, such as the peoples of Tasmania, Fraser Island, Hinchinbrook Island, the Tiwi Islands, and Groote Eylandt, but excluding the ethnically distinct Torres Strait Islands.
Co-lead researcher Shimona Kealy said these people probably travelled through Indonesia's northern islands, into New Guinea and then Australia, which were part of a single continent between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, when sea levels were 25-50 metres below the current level.
The only historical evidence of Mr Stewart's age is an engraving on an old windmill at Wallal Downs Station, about 300 kilometres south of Broome. The rusted iron is marked "Stephen Stewart, 1918", making Mr Stewart at least 103.
In a book titled 1421: The Year China Discovered the World Gavin Menzies claims that in the 1420's several fleets of Chinese ships sailed around the world, making contact with many countries before Europeans explored them, including Australia.
Analysis of maternal genetic lineages revealed that Aboriginal populations moved into Australia around 50,000 years ago. They rapidly swept around the west and east coasts in parallel movements - meeting around the Nullarbor just west of modern-day Adelaide.
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.
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.
Almost half the massacres of Aboriginal people were by police or other government forces, research finds. The first national project to record mass killings on the Australian frontier has found that around half of all massacres of Aboriginal people were carried out by police and other government forces.
They conclude that, like most other living Eurasians, Aborigines descend from a single group of modern humans who swept out of Africa 50,000 to 60,000 years ago and then spread in different directions.
Study suggests continent was colonized by more people than originally suspected. Some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, a band of intrepid Southeast Asians became the first humans to reach Australia, and without a single glance at a GPS unit.
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.
There were between 300,000 to 950,000 Aboriginal people living in Australia when the British arrived in 1788.3 At that time there were approximately 260 distinct language groups and 500 dialects. Land is fundamental to Indigenous people, both individually and collectively.
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.
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 oldest recorded civilization in the world is the Mesopotamia civilization. Overall, the 4 oldest civilizations of the world are Mesopotamia Civilization, Egyptian Civilization, Indus Valley Civilization, and Chinese Civilization. This article will briefly throw light on the oldest civilizations of the world.
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.