CANBERRA: A genetic study on Friday found Aboriginal Australians are descended from the first people to leave Africa up to 75,000 years ago, Xinhua News reports.
Researchers from the University of Western Australia, Murdoch University and an international team analyzed genetic material of a 100-year-old West Australian Aboriginal man’s hair, and found he was directly descended from a migration out of Africa into Asia.
The study revealed that Australian Aboriginal ancestors split from the first modern human populations to leave Africa, between 64,000 and 75,000 years ago, at least 24,000 years before other human migrations.
According to Dr Joe Dortch, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia, the discovery rewrites the history of the human species by confirming humans moved out of Africa in waves of migrations rather than in one single out-of-Africa diaspora.
It also rewrites the story about how Aborigines arrived in Australia some 50,000 years ago.
“So far there are no [archaeological]sites that are over 50, 000 years old so it puts a time limit on that and focuses our future efforts,” he said in a statement released on Friday.
Dr Dortch believes the finding will foster a sense of pride in modern Australian Aborigines.
“No-one else in the world can say ‘I am descended from people who have been here 75,000 years’.”
Associate Professor Darren Curnoe, leader of the Human Evolutionary Biology Lab in the School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales, said the study powerfully confirms that Aboriginal Australians are one of the oldest living populations in the world, certainly the oldest outside of Africa.
“Australians are truly one of the world’s great human populations and a very ancient one at that, with deep connections to the Australian continent and broader Asian region. About this now there can be no dispute,” he told Xinhua in an email note.
Meanwhile, Professor Alan Cooper, Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) at the University of Adelaide, said while this is a major step forward, the key unresolved question remains the unique story of Aboriginal history within Australia, such as what has happened in those 50,000 years of life in the harsh Australian environment.
“Unfortunately, the information from a single individual tells us very little about this fascinating, and critically important part of human history. Aborigines are one of the oldest continuous human populations outside Africa, as they note in the paper, and due to the geographic isolation and limited archaeological records remain one of the most mysterious chapters in human history,” he told Xinhua on Friday.
The study is published on Friday in the journal Science.
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. They together make up more than 2.5 percent of Australia’s population.