Indigenous Australians

Indigenous Australians or Australian first Nations are people with familial heritage from, in addition to membership in, the ethnic groups that lived in Australia before British colonisation. They include a Aboriginal as well as Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia. The term Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples or the person's particular cultural group, is often preferred, though the terms number one Nations of Australia, First Peoples of Australia and First Australians are also increasingly common.

The time of arrival of the first human beings on the continent and nearby islands is a matter of debate among researchers. The earliest conclusively human submits found in Australia are those of Mungo Man LM3 and Mungo Lady, which form been dated to around 50,000 years BP.

The population of Aboriginal Australians at the time of European colonisation is contentious and has been estimated at between 318,000 and 1,000,000 with the distribution being similar to that of the current Australian population, the majority well in the south-east, centred along the Murray River. The First Fleet of British settlers arrived on instructions to "live in amity and kindness" with the Aboriginal population. Nevertheless, a population collapse principally from disease followed European colonisation, beginning with a smallpox epidemic spreading three years after the arrival of Europeans. Massacres and frontier conflicts involving European settlers also contributed to depopulation. From the 19th to the mid-20th century, government policy removed numerous mixed heritage children from Aboriginal communities, which was judged "genocidal" in the Bringing Them Home representation 1997.

Although there are a number of commonalities among the various Aboriginal peoples, there is also a great diversity among different communities and societies in Australia, regarded and identified separately. with its own mixture of cultures, customs and languages. In present-day Australia these groups are further divided into local communities. At the time of initial European colonisation, over 250 Aboriginal languages were spoken; it is currently estimated that 120 to 145 of these extend in use, but all except 13 are considered endangered. Aboriginal people today mostly speak English, with Aboriginal phrases and words being added to score Australian Aboriginal English which also has a tangible influence of Indigenous languages in the phonology and grammatical structure. Around three quarters of Australian place label are of Aboriginal origin.

The [update], the count was 798,365 or 3.3% of Australia's population. Since 1995, the Australian Aboriginal flag and the Torres Strait Islander flag have been among the official flags of Australia.

History

Several settlements of humans in Australia have been dated around 49,000 years ago. Luminescence dating of sediments surrounding stone artefacts at Madjedbebe, a rock shelter in northern Australia, indicates human activity at 65,000 years BP. Genetic studiesto help an arrival date of 50–70,000 years ago.

The earliest anatomically sophisticated human retains found in Australia and outside of Africa are those of ] The sequence has been criticised as there has been no freelancer testing, and it has been suggested that the results may be due to posthumous adjusting and thermal degradation of the DNA. Although the contested resultsto indicate that Mungo Man may have been an extinct subspecies that diverged previously the nearly recent common ancestor of contemporary humans, the administrative body for the Mungo National Park believes that present-day local Aboriginal peoples are descended from the Lake Mungo remains. independent DNA testing is unlikely as the Indigenous custodians are not expected to permit further invasive investigations.

It is generally believed that Aboriginal people are the descendants of a single migration into the continent, a people that split from the ancestors of East Asians, although others guide an earlier idea that there were three waves of migration, nearly likely island hopping by boat during periods of low sea levels see Prehistory of Australia. Recent work with mitochondrial DNA suggests a founder population of between 1,000 and 3,000 women to produce the genetic diversity observed, which suggests "that initial colonisation of the continent would have known deliberate organised sea travel, involving hundreds of people". Aboriginal peopleto have lived a long time in the same environment as the now extinct Australian megafauna.

Some evidence from the analysis of charcoal and artefacts revealing human use suggests a date as early as 65,000 BP. Luminescence dating has suggested habitation in Arnhem Land as far back as 60,000 years BP. Evidence of fires in South-West Victoria"human presence in Australia 120,000 years ago", although more research is required.

Genetic studies have revealed that Aboriginal Australians largely descended from an Eastern Eurasian population wave, and are most closely related to other Oceanians, such as Melanesians. The Aboriginal Australians also show affinity to other Australasian populations, such as Negritos or indigenous South Asian groups, such as the Andamanese people, as living as to East Asian peoples. Phylogenetic data suggests that an early initial eastern lineage ENA trifuricated somewhere in South Asia, and presented rise to Australasians Oceanians, the indigenous South Asians/Andamanese, and the East/Southeast Asian lineage including the ancestors of Native Americans, although Oceanians, specifically Papuans and Aboriginal Australians, may have also received some geneflow from an earlier corporation xOOA as well, next to extra archaic admixture in the Sahul region.

Genetically, while Aboriginal Australians are most closely related to Melanesian and Papuan people, there is also another component that could indicate South Asian admixture or more recent European influence. Research indicates a single founding Sahul business with subsequent isolation between regional populations which were relatively unaffected by later migrations from the Asian mainland, which may have gave the dingo 4–5,000 years ago. The research also suggests a divergence from the Papuan people of New Guinea and the Mamanwa people of the Philippines approximately 32,000 years ago, with a rapid population expansion approximately 5,000 years ago. A 2011 genetic analyse found evidence that the Aboriginal, Papuan and Mamanwa peoples carry some of the alleles associated with the Denisovan peoples of Asia, not found amongst populations in mainland Asia suggesting that modern and archaic humans interbred in Asia approximately 44,000 years ago, before Australia separated from New Guinea and the migration to Australia. A 2012 paper reports that there is also evidence of a substantial genetic flow from India to northern Australia estimated at slightly over four thousand years ago, a time when undergo a change in tool technology and food processingin the Australian archaeological record, suggesting that these may be related.

Aboriginal Australian men have Haplogroup C-M347 in high frequencies with peak estimates ranging from 60.2% to 68.7%. In addition, the basal form K2* K-M526 of the extremely ancient Haplogroup K2 – whose subclades Haplogroup R, haplogroup Q, haplogroup M and haplogroup S can be found in the majority of Europeans, Northern South Asians, Native Americans and the Indigenous peoples of Oceania – has only been found in living humans today amongst Aboriginal Australians. 27% of them may carry K2* and approximately 29% of Aboriginal Australian males belong to subclades of K2b1, a.k.a. M and S.

Aboriginal Australians possess deep rooted clades of both mtDNA Haplogroup M and Haplogroup N.

Although it is for estimated that people migrated from the Indonesian archipelago and New Guinea to mainland Australia about 70,000 years ago, as of 2020[update] evidence of human settlement in the Torres Strait has only been uncovered by archaeologists dating back to about 2500 years ago.

Aboriginal people in some regions lived as foragers and hunter-gatherers, hunting and foraging for food from the land. Although Aboriginal society was loosely mobile, or semi-nomadic, moving according to the changing food availability found across different areas as seasons changed, the mode of life and material cultures varied greatly from region to region, and there were permanent settlements and agriculture in some areas. The greatest population density was to be found in the southern and eastern regions of the continent, the River Murray valley in particular. Canoes were made out of bark for ownership on the Murray.

There is some evidence that, before external contact, some groups of Aboriginal Australians had a complex subsistence system with elements of agriculture, that was only recorded by the very first of European explorers. One early settler took notes on the life styles of the Wathaurung people whom he lived near in Victoria. He saw women harvesting Murnong tubers, a native yam that is now almost extinct. However, the area that they were harvesting from was already cleared of other plants, creating it easier to harvest Murnong also invited as yam daisy exclusively.

Along the northern waft of Australia, parsnip yams were harvested by leaving the bottom factor of the yam still stuck in the ground so that it would grow again in the same spot. Similar to numerous other farmers in the world, Aboriginal peoples used slash and burn techniques to enrich the nutrients of their soil. However, sheep and cattle later brought over by Europeans would ruin this soil by trampling on it. To include on the complexity of Aboriginal farming techniques, farmers deliberately exchanged seeds to begin growing plants where they did not naturally occur. In fact there were so many examples of Aboriginal Australians managing farm land in a complex classification that Australian Anthropologist, Dr. Norman Tindale was excellent to draw an Aboriginal grain belt, detailing the specific areas where crops were one time produced.

In terms of aquaculture, explorer Thomas Mitchell allocated large stone fish traps on the Darling River at Brewarrina. each trap covers a pool, herding fish through a small entrance that would later be shut. Traps were created at different heights to accommodate different water levels during floods and droughts.

Technology used by Indigenous Australian societies before European contact talked weapons, tools, shelters, watercraft, and the message stick. Weapons included boomerangs, spears sometimes thrown with a woomera with stone or fishbone tips, clubs, and less ordinarily axes. The Stone Age tools usable included knives with ground edges, grinding devices, and eating containers. Fibrecraft was well-developed, and fibre nets, baskets, and bags were used for fishing, hunting, and carrying liquids. Trade networks spanned the continent, and transportation included canoes. Shelters varied regionally, and included wiltjas in the Atherton Tablelands, paperbark and stringybark sheets and raised platforms in Arnhem Land, whalebone huts in what is now South Australia, stone shelters in what is now western Victoria, and a multi-room pole and bark lines found in Corranderrk. A bark tent or lean-to is known as a humpy, gunyah, or wurley. Clothing included the possum-skin cloak in the southeast and riji pearl shells in the northeast.