Australia is home to the world’s oldest living and continuous culture. First Nations people have been vital custodians and inhabitants of Australia for millennia, with Indigenous Australians tracing their lineage and culture back multiple thousands of years.
It's long been believed that the ancestors of today's Indigenous Australians, the Sahul people, first reached the continent around 65,000 years ago. However, a new genetic study from the University of Utah suggests their arrival may have been more recent – around 50,000 years.
The research conducted by Jim Allen, an Australian professor of archaeology at La Trobe University, and James F. O’Connell, a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, re-analysed archeological sites and existing Neanderthal DNA in modern humans. Their findings indicate that the Sahul people most likely arrived by sea between 43,500 and 51,500 years ago. This conclusion is supported by evidence that all modern humans, including Indigenous Australians, carry one to four per cent Neanderthal DNA from a single interbreeding event with Neanderthals during that period.
Archaeological evidence also aligns with this later timeline: most sites across Australia date to between 43,000 and 54,000 years ago, reinforcing the idea that the first human settlement occurred more recently than previously thought.
The exact number of years that humans arrived in Australia has long been subject to scientific debate. A study of the archeological site Madjedbebe in 2017 found evidence of human activity in Australia from 65,000 to 70,000 years ago. However, the new research challenges this, stating that the dating technique used by archaeologists was flawed, with it potentially measuring the age of sand deposits rather than the artefacts themselves.
O’Connell told Sitech Daily: “The question for us has not been about the validity of the date. It’s about the relationship between the date and material evidence of human presence – that is, artifacts. In that part of Australia, many older archaeological sites are in situations where the depositional environment is a sand sheet. Material can move down through those deposits over time.”
This study revealed that humans (most likely) intentionally traversed wild ocean currents from Southeast Asia to Australia half a million years ago. O'Connell also has said that after analysing genetic mitochondrial data, it's evident that the Sahul people came in at least four separate groups over the course of a few centuries, meaning a staggered migration of homo sapiens to Australia that the data has traced back to no later than 50,000 years ago.
Despite this study being recently released, there's still strong debate from multiple researchers that humans arrived in Australia 65,000 years ago, with there being no definitive conclusion from the scientific community at this time.
But above all, two things remain crystal clear: Australia has been home to human beings for a staggeringly long time, and Indigenous Australia contains a rich, beautiful and deeply ancient living culture that pre-dates every other culture on Earth today.