[SunkenCiv]

Arrival of First Australians infographic. Arrival of First Australians infographic. Credit: Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH)

[marktwain]

Both studies are unique because they relied on past environmental information and did not use any genetic data.

Thus avoiding the controversy over *when* the lastest aboriginal inhabitants arrived, and how many waves of immigrants there were.

[Larry Lucido]

So even the aboriginals dumped their criminals on Australia 10,000 years ago!

[Thommas]

.. deliberate migrations by island-hopping..

What kind of boats did these migrants have at their disposal 50,000 years ago? Do these archeologists have any clue what kind of boats/water craft these folks could have constructed?

In another thread, concerning the migration of people to Japan, the archeologists in the parent article denoted a drop in sea levels, thus allowing the flow of migrants to Japan.

Not to step too harshly into the realm of historical speculation, but with the massive glaciation that occurred in the millennium past, and the subsequent drop in sea levels, wouldn't the migration to the Australian continent and surrounding isles be more easily explained as with the Japanese migration, i.e., walking/wading to the new lands?

[Jim Noble]

They used sophisticated modelling to determine not only the likely routes travelled by Aboriginal people tens of thousands of years ago, but also the sizes of groups required for the population to survive in harsh conditions....The research, published today in two companion papers (one in Scientific Reports and the other in Nature Ecology and Evolution), confirms the theory

This type of "research" can't "confirm" anything.

[centurion316]

We have historical evidence of remarkable voyages in these waters in boats little different from what might have been available to ancient peoples. Lieutenant William Bligh in the launch of HMS Bounty made a voyage of 3,600 nautical miles to Timor with other crewmen of the Bounty. Survivors of HMS Pandora (with some Bounty muniteers as prisoners) made a much shorter voyage from the Great Barrier Reef to Timor.

Polynesian voyages were made throughout the Pacific on boats made of local materials. We will likely discover that such voyages were made by ancient peoples thousands of years ago from Asia to North America and from Europe to North America. The absence of physical evidence have led us to underestimate the sea faring capabilities of these people.