Posted on 09/21/2016 9:26:38 PM PDT by 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).
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
It explains why marsupials and monotremes are found in Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania but not elsewhere.
If you call that a civilization.
My thought also: tribes and tribal survival in a harsh land? certainly.
Civilization?
Nonsense.
Blame it on global warming.
I guess it depends on your definition of civilization. The field genetics is finding some fascinating stuff. This out of Africa migration theory points to a migration some 100,000 years ago where a large number of migrants diverged east and west somewhere around Israel. Those who went east traveled across Asia and into the Americas. Those who went west settled Europe. Those people didn’t meet again until Columbus discovered the New World.
A very long time ago in a]college anthropology classes I was taught that ‘civilization’ meant that a culture had grown to the point of establishing cities. Aborigines may well be the oldest continuous culture on earth. More power to them! But they never got to the stage of agriculture and cities. Unless, of course, we have redefined ‘civilization’ to include any group of people, since all cultures are equal.
I don’t understand the big deal here. Battlestar Galactica (reboot) explains everything. Just watch it as a documentary. :)
There is a very large rat running around in this learned study. Let me explain.
Based on actual events, the Earth has not only experienced this rise in sea level, but has prospered and flourished after it. Enough of a rise to separate Tasmania from Australia.
And yet, just a few feet of speculative sea level rise from "climate change" is going to produce CATASTROPHE.
And inquiring minds want to know: how many coal mines did we have to shut down 50,000 years ago to stop this sea level rise? How many jobs did we have to kill?
More like a culture .
Look at how the Australian Aborigines lived. They killed all the jobs. Such heroic self-sacrifice by a culture is unprecedented. This theory will be confirmed when we discover their ancient SUV graveyards, buried somewhere in the outback.
Sailing travelers from Indonesia introduced the bow and arrow to Australia over ten thousand years ago.
The abos couldn’t figure them out, and never adopted them.
The abos and sub-Saharans never built multi-story dwellings, until outsiders showed up and helped them.
Something our Indians did quite well, from Chaco Canyon NM to the many civilizations of Central and South America.
Can you call a conglomeration of mud huts a true city?
Opossums?
50,000 years ago we were still in the last ice age. Sea levels were much lower than they are now because so much water was tied up in ice. We have been gradually warming ever since. There are ancient American Indian campfire remains that have been found off the coast of North Carolina under 150 feet of water that long ago was dry land. Tasmania was isolated from the rest of Australia only 11,000 years ago. The people who were already living on Tasmania “forgot” such technology as bone sewing needles. The climate change of 10,000 years ago was a big part of what made agriculture possible (starting in the Middle East and Central America), changing just about everything for the human race.
Speaking of ice ages, warm spells typically go all the way to an ice free planet. By that standard, we are still in the last stages of an ice age that started a couple of hundred thousand years ago. Life has survived an ice free world, and we will again. A warmer world is arguably better for human flourishing. Human activity may (or may not) speed up a process that is happening anyway, but it will be slow enough that we can adjust, primarily by moving a bit upland. Current shoreline properties may become unusable, but other property will go up in value. No need to cripple industrial civilization.
Oldest continuous and uninterrupted genetic enclave, maybe.
Civilization - nope. They never had agriculture.
I can see having a culture that lasts millenia on a remote continent. Try having a long lived culture in a place where various land and sea routes come together, cheek to cheek with other, more rapacious cultures
I’ll have to watch that.
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