Indigenous Australians most ancient civilisation on Earth, extensive DNA study confirms

The Telegraph ^ | 22 September 2016 | Chiara Palazzo

[Theoria]

The first extensive study of Indigenous Australians' DNA dates their origin to more than 50,000 years ago, backing the claim that they are the most ancient continuous civilisation on Earth. 

Scientists used the genetic traces of the mysterious early humans that are left in the DNA of modern populations in Papua New Guinea and Australia to recontruct their journey from Africa around 72,000 years ago.

Experts disagree on whether present-day non-African people are descended from explorers who left Africa in a single exodus or a series of distinct waves of travelling migrants.

The new study supports the single migration hypothesis. It indicates that Australian aboriginal and Papuan people both originated from the same out-of Africa migration event some 72,000 years ago, along with ancestors of all other non-African populations alive today.

Tracing the Papuan and Australian groups' progress showed that around 50,000 years ago they reached Sahul - a prehistoric supercontinent that once united New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania before they were separated by rising sea levels.

According to the study, the findings of which feature in one of four major human origins papers published in Nature this week, Aboriginal Australians and Papuans met and interbred with the unknown race of humans, who may have had links with Siberian Denisovans, as they migrated out of Africa.

Like the Neanderthals, the Denisovans were a distinct sub-species of the human family that has been extinct for many thousands of years.

According to the study the unknown extinct relative would have contributed about four per cent to the Indigenous Australian genome. Previously, scientists found that pre-historic interbreeding left non-Africans with a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA (ranging somewhere between one and six per cent).

[alexander_busek]

It explains why marsupials and monotremes are found in Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania but not elsewhere.

Close to 70% of the 334 extant species occur on the Australian continent (the mainland, Tasmania, New Guinea and nearby islands). The remaining 100 are found in the Americas — primarily in South America, but thirteen in Central America, and one in North America, north of Mexico.

-Wikipedia

Regards,

[Theoria]