Aborigines and Eurasians rode one migration wave

1. Elizabeth Culotta,
2. Ann Gibbons

Science  23 Sep 2016:
Vol. 353, Issue 6306, pp. 1352-1353
DOI: 10.1126/science.353.6306.1352

Elizabeth Culotta

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Ann Gibbons

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Summary

A​ustralian Aborigines have long been cast as a people apart. Although Australia is halfway around the world from our species’s accepted birthplace in Africa, the continent is nevertheless home to some of the earliest undisputed signs of modern humans outside Africa, and Aborigines have unique languages and cultural adaptations. Some researchers have posited that the ancestors of the Aborigines were the first modern humans to surge out of Africa, spreading swiftly eastward along the coasts of southern Asia thousands of years before a second wave of migrants populated Eurasia. Not so, according to a trio of genomic studies, the first to analyze many full genomes from Australia and New Guinea. They conclude that, like most other living Eurasians, Aborigines descend from a single group of modern humans who swept out of Africa 50,000 to 60,000 years ago and then spread in different directions. That means that most people outside of Africa today trace their ancestry back to a single great expansion. The study also reaffirms Aborigines’ deep roots and long isolation in Australia, echoing Aboriginal views of their prehistory.