People Sailed To Australia And New Guinea 60,000 years ago
Some came straight from mainland Southeast Asia. Others came via the Philippines.
Benjamin Taub
Edited
by
Johannes Van Zijl
The ancient landmass known as Sahul - which includes Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea - was home to groups of humans as early as 60,000 years ago, according to genetic data. This finding suggests that our ancestors may have made it Down Under just ten millennia or so after first setting foot outside of Africa, which is pretty impressive if you think about it.
Recent genomic studies have suggested that Indigenous groups across the region can trace their ancestry back only to around 50,000 years ago. However, not everyone accepts this scenario - which is referred to as the “short chronology” for the peopling of Sahul - as some archaeological discoveries in the area have been dated to earlier than this point.
The only way this makes sense is if these older relics were left behind by a group of people who simply vanished without leaving any descendants. Speaking to IFLScience, Professor Martin Richards from the University of Huddersfield said that “you’d have to assume that all those early archaeological dates between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago were people who got wiped out by another wave of people who came through.”
Given the distance between Africa and Sahul, however, it's reasonable to think that only a very well-established and successful population could ever make it that far, which makes it difficult to accept that these intrepid migrants could so easily disappear after arriving in Oceania. To figure out what really happened, Richards and his colleagues analyzed 2,456 mitochondrial genomes from the region, “encompassing the full range of diversity from the indigenous populations of Australia, New Guinea, and Oceania.”
More:
https://www.iflscience.com/people-sailed-to-australia-and-new-guinea-60000-years-ago-81731