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Cosmos Magazine reports that 42,000-year-old evidence of human occupation has been identified at the site of Elivavan in southeast Indonesia's Tanimbar Islands. "Along with tiny fragments of pottery we also found evidence of things like bones, shells, and sea urchins that point to the island's role as a hub for early maritime activities," said Hendri Kaharudin of Australian National University. Kaharudin and his colleagues suggest the site is situated along a possible southern route traveled by prehistoric migrants to the region of the paleocontinent known as Sahul, which includes what are now Papua New Guinea and Australia. "This island-hopping strategy...

The Wallacean islands have always been separated from Asia and Oceania by deep-sea waters. Yet, these tropical islands were a corridor for modern humans migrating into the Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea landmass (Sahul) and have been home to modern human groups for at least 47,000 years. The archaeological record attests a major cultural transition across Wallacea that started around 3,500 years ago and is associated with the expansion of Austronesian-speaking farmers, who intermixed with local hunter-gatherer groups. However, previous genetic studies of modern-day inhabitants have yielded conflicting dates for this intermixing, ranging from 1,100 to nearly 5,000 years ago.

Geneticists re-examining the first settlement of Australia and Papua-New Guinea by modern humans have concluded that the two islands were reached some 50,000 years ago by a single group of people who remained in substantial or total isolation until recent times. The finding, if upheld, would undermine assumptions that there have been subsequent waves of migration into Australia. Analyzing old and new samples of Aborigine DNA, which are hard to obtain because of governmental restrictions, the geneticists developed a detailed picture of the aborigines’ ancestry, as reflected in their Y chromosomes, found just in men, and their mitochondrial DNA, a...