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It remains debated how Australia was initially populated and how changes in language and culture in the continent happened. Australia contains some of the oldest archaeological evidence of modern humans outside Africa dating back to about 50,000 years. Still about 90% of Aboriginal Australians speak languages belonging to a single linguistic family that dates back no more than a few thousand years. The first population genomic studies on Aboriginal Australians published in this week’s Nature provide some of the answers.
DNA in hair samples collected from Aboriginal people across Australia in the early to mid-1900s has revealed that populations have been continuously present in the same regions for up to 50,000 years.
Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections of Genetic Heritage: The Legal, Ethical and Practical Considerations of a Dynamic Consent Approach to Decision Making
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