How Did Aboriginal Australians Reach Australia 50,000 Years Ago?

Australia’s First Nations population, the Aboriginal Australians, say that they have always been in Australia. The evidence suggests that they are right. Indigenous Australians arrived on the continent at least 50,000 years ago, more than 20,000 years before First Nation peoples arrived in the Americas. What is the story of these pioneering travelers who were the first modern humans to dare such an intrepid journey?

Today, the leading scientific theory is that modern humans, Homo Sapiens, evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago. Forerunner hominid species, such as Homo Erectus and the Neanderthals, had already moved out of Africa as early as 1.5 million years ago, but they were eventually outcompeted and didn’t manage to thrive.

Homo Sapiens also migrated out of Africa. It is disputed when this started to happen, potentially as early as 200,000 years ago. But it seems that early migrations weren’t very successful, and like other hominid species, they failed to establish themselves.

That is why, even though there is evidence of early Homo Sapiens in Greece as long as 215,000 years ago, it seems that modern Europeans are descendants of Homo Sapiens that migrated out of Africa and through the Middle East less than 55,000 years ago.

A Unique Migratory Wave

The people who headed to Australia do not seem to be closely related to those who would eventually settle in Europe. Instead, they belong to an earlier migratory wave that headed out of Africa around 70,000 years ago.

They passed through the Levant and into Asia, passing through India and China, before heading south as far as Indonesia. Because sea levels were much lower at this time, this was a journey that could be made over land. But they were eventually stopped by the sea.

That this migration wave was separate from the European migration wave and other later waves is evident in their genome. This wave seems to have had contact with surviving Neanderthal populations during their migration, represented by the 2.5% Neanderthal DNA, evident in indigenous Australian populations.

But when they reached the coast, 50-60,000 years ago, they had a new challenge. Asia was separated from a supercontinent called Sahul that included New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania, thanks to low sea levels. They had to make a treacherous sea crossing to reach this new continent, which they could not even have been sure was there.

As a point of comparison, they embarked on this endeavor at least 30,000 years before other First Nation people passed over the Bering Land Bridge into the Americas, which is estimated to have happened between 30-15,000 years ago.

While it is clear that the sea voyage between Southeast Asia and the Australian continent would have been hazardous, we don’t really know how the journey was made. There is no surviving evidence that preserves the types of boats or naval technology that were used so long ago.

Modern native Australians mainly use two types of boat, dugout canoes and bark canoes. Bark canoes are mainly used for navigating rivers and swamps. They are made from one or multiple pieces of bark sewn together with rope and caulked. The interior of the boat is then reinforced with wooden rods.

Dugout canoes are used for traveling on open waters. They are carved from a single log and propelled by a sail weaved from pandanus fibers. They also have wooden paddles with oblong-shaped heads.

It is conceivable that the ancient Australians made the crossing in more primitive versions of these boats, but they also could have taken to the ocean on simple rafts. It would have taken at least four to seven days to make the trip.

Some scholars suggest that the native Australian people made this journey as long as 65,000 years ago, due to evidence of human occupation at Madjedbebe, a rock shelter in Arnhem Land. However, the dating of this site has been seriously questioned. A date of around 50,000 years ago is better supported by the general archeological record and would fit better with the extinction of Australian megafauna around 42,000 years ago, partially as a result of the disruption caused by Australia’s newest residents.

Researchers know quite a bit about the migration of these new travelers once they arrived on the southern continent thanks to a 2017 DNA study based on hair samples obtained from Indigenous communities between 1926 and 1963, coupled with archeological findings, linguistic analysis, and ethnographic studies.

It seems that they dispersed quickly. Groups traveled along the fertile coast, some headed southeast through Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria, and others headed southwest around the coast of Western Australia, until they met at the Nullarbor, near Adelaide in South Australia. This only seems to have taken around 1,000 years or so.

Individual groups seem to have set down roots as they went, and once they set down roots they stayed put. The DNA evidence suggests that interaction between the geographically dispersed groups was fairly limited and hundreds of distinct native language groups emerged.

This was a surprise, as researchers expected Australia to look like other regions of the world, where constant waves of migration brought different populations into contact with each other, leading to intermingling and the emergence of new cultures and ethnic groups. Why didn’t this happen in Australia?

The current theory is that Australian groups remained isolated because they never adopted agriculture, rather living a hunter-gatherer existence. This means that they did not have the excess of carbohydrates that allowed for the rapid population growth that places pressure on communities and forces them to expand beyond their established borders. They also didn’t suffer the same kind of devastating crop failures that could result in famine and the need to migrate.

As a result, there seems to have been very little contact between mainland Indigenous Australians and their cousins in New Guinea for around 40,000 years, despite the fact that the landmasses were only separated by water around 10,000 years ago.

Today, the term Indigenous Australians includes both First Nations people from the Australian mainland and native inhabitants of the Torres Strait Islands off the coast of Queensland. This group of almost 300 islands was annexed by the state of Queensland in 1879.

But Torres Strait Islanders are not closely related to Indigenous people from the mainland. They are rather Melanesian, just like the people of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji. They are more closely related to the Polynesian people who settled on islands including Hawaii, Samoa, and New Zealand.

The people of the Torres Straits seem to have arrived on the islands less than 10,000 years ago, as before that time the islands were part of the land bridge that connected New Guinea and Australia. Based on genetics, it is believed that they traveled out of Asia, probably the area around Taiwan, between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago.

It was from the Melanesian islands that sailors set out to Polynesia, with minimal contact with people from mainland Australia as there is no evidence of genetic mixing. The settlers reached the most western islands of Polynesia, such as Tonga, around 1000-900 BCE. It was also around this time that a cultural divide began to emerge between the people of Melanesia, including the Torres Strait Islands, and the people of Polynesia.

It was this new Polynesian cultural group that would head east to Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island, but it took about a thousand years. They settled the islands between 1200 and 1300 CE. At this time, they already had access to relatively advanced maritime innovations such as the catamaran, outrigger boats, and crab claw sails. This is part of the reason they were able to travel much further and populate far-flung Pacific islands.

Europeans arrived in Australia in 1788 and began to disrupt the indigenous Australian way of life. It is estimated that there were between 300,000 and 950,000 indigenous Australians when the Europeans landed, but hundreds of thousands were killed by warfare, disease, and persecution. Today they make up just 3% of the Australian population, which is fewer than one million people.

There is no denying that First Nation Australians were pioneers. They were among the first people to move out of Africa, and one of the few early migration groups that managed to thrive. They made a treacherous sea journey with limited technology and managed to live in harmony with Australia’s unique environment. They have been in Australia for at least 50,000 years, so it seems fitting to say that it has been their home since the Dreamtime.