Hair Shows Aborigine Ancestors Were First to Explore World
Hair Shows Aborigine Ancestors Were First to Explore World
Glenn Campbell/The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media via Getty Images
Children carry ashore a dugong at a meeting of over 200 Indigenous land and marine rangers at Borroloola in the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory.
Children carry ashore a dugong at a meeting of over 200 Indigenous land and marine rangers at Borroloola in the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory. Photographer: Glenn Campbell/The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media via Getty Images
Scientists are rewriting the history of human migration based on a 100-year-old hair sample.
Genetic analysis by Danish researchers of curly, dark- colored locks indicates that Australian Aborigines are direct descendants of the first people to migrate out of Africa, according to findings published in the journal Science. The Aborigines’ forebears probably made their way across the world 24,000 years before another wave led Europe’s and Asia’s settlement, the scientists said.
The analysis of the hair, donated by an Aborigine man to a British anthropologist a century ago, shows that Aborigines’ ancestors split from the first populations in Africa 62,000 to 75,000 years ago, moving east and eventually to Australia. Europe and Asia were first settled as many as 38,000 years ago, the researchers said.
“Our findings support the hypothesis that present-day Aboriginal Australians descend from the earliest humans to occupy Australia, likely representing one of the oldest continuous populations outside Africa,” the researchers wrote in the study.
The findings contradict the view of a single exodus from Africa that populated the rest of the world yet fits better with archeological findings that show human inhabitation of Australia as long as 50,000 years ago, according to the study’s authors.
Mapping DNA
“There will obviously be people who continue to fight for the single dispersion theory, but I think the data now fits with the archeological records better,” Morten Rasmussen, the study’s lead author and an expert in evolutionary biology, said by phone. “We’ll probably need a few more studies.”
Eske Willerslev, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, and other researchers mapped the DNA in the 100- year-old hair and found no evidence of genes from modern immigrants to Australia.
“While Europeans’ and Asians’ descendants sat in one or another place in Africa or the Middle East and had yet to start exploring, the forefathers of the Aborigines spread out quickly,” Willerslev said in a statement from the University of Copenhagen. “It is really an amazing journey that demanded exceptional survival skills and courage.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Frances Schwartzkopff in Copenhagen at fschwartzko1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tasneem Brogger at tbrogger@bloomberg.net or Angela Cullen at acullen8@bloomberg.net
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