Aborigine Origins Identified?
A mystery here on Australia that continues to strike debate among Australian scientists and the Australian community in general is what are the origins of the native Aborigines of Australia? It is pretty much agreed by everyone that the natives on the island of New Guinea migrated to the Australian mainland some 40,000-50,000 years ago when the Ice Age lowered sea levels enough where the island of New Guinea was connected by a land bridge to the York Peninsula in Queensland. This same lowering of ocean levels allowed the Aborigines to occupy Tasmania as well. Now the big question is how did the Aborigines get to New Guinea to begin with? The black natives on New Guinea and the Australian aborigines share no genetic relations to the Asian and Polynesian peoples of southeast Asia that they are surrounded by. Well some scientists believe the Aborigines arrived in Australia from Africa:
Australia along with the rest of the world was first settled by a single group of settlers who left Africa more than 55,000 years, new DNA research suggests.Once there, they apparently evolved in relative isolation, developing genetic characteristics and technology found nowhere else until the arrival of the first European settlers.
The uniqueness of Australia’s ancient Aborigines and archaeological finds on the continent have previously threatened to undermine the “out of Africa” hypothesis of human origins favoured by most experts.
But the latest research by geneticists at the University of Cambridge reinforces the theory that all modern human beings belonging to the species Homo sapiens are descended from a small number of Africans who left their home between 55,000 and 60,000 years ago.
If the Aborigines are linked genetically to a single group of settlers from Africa how in the world did they get to Australia? I seriously doubt people back then were skilled enough to build boats to sail to Australia which means they had to walk and make short boat trips between islands in Indonesia to reach Australia. So how did black Africans simply walk through lands filled with Asians and Polynesians to get to New Guinea and Australia? It is a fascinating question that will probably continue to perplex researchers for some time to come.