Aboriginals were the first residents of Australia, study confirms

Contrary to previously published research, Aboriginal people were indeed the first to inhabit the continent of Australia, scientists at the Griffith University Research Centre for Human Evolution (RCHE) reported recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to study author and RCHE Professor David Lambert and his colleagues, their findings refute an earlier paper which stated that DNA sequences taken from the oldest known Australian, a set of male remains recovered from Lake Mungo in New South Wales informally known as the Mungo Man, represented a now-extinct lineage of humans that pre-dated Aborigines.

That study, which was published in 2001, claimed that mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) recovered from the 42,000-year-old Mungo Man indicated that it was not related to Aboriginal Australians, and that it must have been an extinct subspecies that diverged prior to the most recent common ancestor of modern humans, seemingly supporting the multiregional origin hypothesis.

New analysis reveals that the previous samples were contaminated

Those results have long been viewed as controversial in the scientific community, and now, 15 years after their original publication, Lambert and a team of colleagues from the US, Denmark, Austria, the UK and New Zealand argue that the findings had indeed been erroneously drawn.

“The sample from Mungo Man which we retested contained sequences from five different European people suggesting that these all represent contamination,” he said in a statement. “At the same time we re-analyzed more than 20 of the other ancient people from Willandra. We were successful in recovering the genomic sequence of one of the early inhabitants of Lake Mungo, a man buried very close to the location where Mungo Man was originally interred.”

“By going back and reanalyzing the samples with more advanced technology, we have found compelling support for the argument that Aboriginal Australians were the first inhabitants of Australia,” the professor added, noting that thanks to advancements in genomic technology, his team was able to obtain more information from ancient Aboriginal Australian remains.

Using that technology, the new study discovered multiple sources of European contamination on genetic samples taken from the Mungo Man, and the authors report that their work marks the first time scientists have been able to recover an ancient mitochondrial genome sequence from an Aboriginal person who lived prior to the Europeans’ arrival. Their study was supported by the Barkindjii, Ngiyampaa, and Muthi Muthi indigenous people.

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