"One theory assumes that modern Aboriginal Australians descend from the same migration wave the Asians and Europeans descend from. The alternative hypothesis is that there were two major waves of dispersal - a first a wave that relatively quickly reached Australia, and then a second wave that settled Europe and most of Asia, and replaced the descendants of the first wave in these regions. It was also unclear whether the modern day Aboriginal Australians descended from the first modern human individuals settling Australia about 50,000 years ago, or if they descended from later settlers, Nielsen said.
The new study concludes that humans probably dispersed in two waves out of Africa, with the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians forming the first wave of explorers who spread via Asia around 70,000 years ago."
Friday, September 23, 2011
The first DNA sequencing of an Aboriginal rewrites the human dispersal story
The first DNA sequencing of an Australian Aboriginal rewrites the human dispersal story
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It's amazing to think their origins go back 70,000 years. The way Australian aborigines lived probably gives us a good idea of how society was structured in neolithic times. Today we are accustomed to languages with many speakers over wide geographic areas. In Australia, basically it was one tribe, one language, you took a wife from another tribe, never from your own, the children learned the parents' and if they were still alive maybe the grandparents' languages. The languages were not isolated by geography, it was a conscious decision to keep themselves different. Their origin myths say as much, "We created you! This is your language! Speak it!". The elders would repeat the story in the neighbouring languages to stress the point.
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