Remapping the superhighways traveled by the first Australians reveals a 10,000-year journey

[Still Waters]

New research has revealed that the process of 'peopling' the entire continent of Sahul—the combined mega continent that joined Australia with New Guinea when sea levels were much lower than today—took 10,000 years.

New, sophisticated models combined recent improvements in demography and models of wayfinding based on geographic inference to show the scale of the challenges faced by the ancestors of Indigenous people making their mass migration across the supercontinent more than 60,000 years ago.

The ancestors of Aboriginal people likely first entered the continent 75,000–50,000 years ago from what is today the island of Timor, followed by later migrations through the western regions of New Guinea.

According to the new research, this pattern led to a rapid expansion both southward toward the Great Australian Bight, and northward from the Kimberley region to settle all parts of New Guinea and, later, the southwest and southeast of Australia.

https://phys.org/news/2023-02-remapping-superhighways-australians-reveals-year.html

The new research has just been published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379123000197?

[Abramelin]

Just today I found something about an unknown people, the "Toaleans" :

https://theconversation.com/who-were-the-toaleans-ancient-womans-dna-provides-first-evidence-for-the-origin-of-a-mysterious-lost-culture-166565