Genetics reveal 50,000 years of independent history of aboriginal Australian people

Popular Archaeology ^ | Thursday, February 25, 2016 | Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

[SunkenCiv]

Scientists worked with aboriginal Australian communities to explore heritage...

Modern humans arrived in Australia about 50 thousand years ago, forming the ancestors of present-day Aboriginal Australians. They were amongst the earliest settlers outside Africa. They arrived in an ancient continent made up of today's Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea, called Sahul, probably thousands of years before modern humans arrived in Europe.

Five thousand years ago, dingos, the native dogs, somehow arrived in Australia, and changes in stone tool use and language around the same time raised the question of whether there were also associated genetic changes in the Australian Aboriginal population. At least two previous genetic studies, one of which was based on the Y chromosome, had proposed that these changes could have coincided with mixing of Aboriginal and Indian populations about 5 thousand years ago.

Anders Bergstrom, first author on the paper at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said: "We worked closely with Aboriginal Australian communities to sequence the Y chromosome DNA from 13 male volunteers to investigate their ancestry. The data show that Aboriginal Australian Y chromosomes are very distinct from Indian ones. These results refute the previous Y chromosome study, thus excluding this part of the puzzle as providing evidence for a prehistoric migration from India. Instead, the results are in agreement with the archaeological record about when people arrived in this part of the world." ...

Further study is needed to answer questions such as how the dingo did get to Australia and why other people such as the seafaring Polynesians didn't settle on the continent. Expanding the genetic analyses beyond the Y chromosome and to the whole genome will also be necessary to completely rule out external genetic influences on the Aboriginal Australian population before the very recent times.

[SunkenCiv]

Mr Sober88, Wikimedia Commons

[SunkenCiv]

[Jack Black]

Millions spent on Australia's Aborigines yeild dismal results}

[freedomjusticeruleoflaw]

Easy to believe, I’ve been there.

[blam]

'First Americans Were Australian'

[ckilmer]

olmec statues look negroid

http://bit.ly/1Rby6sn

toltec statues look very different.
http://bit.ly/1pgNpJM

[SunkenCiv]

:’)

[ReagansShinyHair]

I find it disappointing that people can only “see” three races. Everyone that ever lived has to be crammed into one of those three. Never mind that you can see living people today who look just like an Olmec statue, but are clearly not “negroid.”

[SunkenCiv]

Aboriginal Australian Y-Chromosomes Dated Back 50,000 Years

[SunkenCiv]

Genetic study reveals 50 thousand years of independent history of Aboriginal Australian people [Linda Williams, Aboriginal artist]