<p>He, and perhaps all aboriginal Australians, the genome indicates, descend from the first humans to venture far beyond Africa more than 60,000 years ago, and thousands of years before the ancestors of most modern Asians trekked east in a second migration out of Africa.<br /><br />“Aboriginal Australians are descendents of the first human explorers. These are the guys who expanded to unknown territory into an unknown world, eventually reaching Australia,” says Eske Willerslev, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, who led the study. It appears online in Science.<br /><br />Hanging on a hair<br />The oldest human remains in Australia date to around 50,000 years ago, and yet older stone tools found in India and elsewhere hint at an early southern migration of anatomically modern humans out of Africa and through India and Southeast Asia. <br /><br />However, genetic studies of contemporary Asians and Oceanians haven’t always told the same story. The most comprehensive genetic analysis carried out so far pointed to a single migration that spawned all Asian populations, including aboriginal Australians. But estimated times of the separation of European and Asian ancestors in this population does not chime well with the archaeological evidence for the continuous settlement of Australia from much earlier times.<br /><br />“These papers make an overwhelming case for multiple waves of migration.” A complete genome from an aboriginal Australian would settle this debate, Willerslev says. Many contemporary Aboriginal Australians also descend from Europeans because of recent interbreeding between Aboriginals and Australian colonists. To get a better picture of the ancient history of Aboriginals, Willerslev wanted to sequence the genome of someone who did not descend from Europeans.<br /><br />About a year ago, his team obtained a hair sample originally collected by the British ethnologist Alfred Cort Haddon. Historical records suggest that Haddon got the hair from a young Aboriginal man in the early 1920s while on a train journey from Sydney to Perth.<br /><br />Willerslev believes that the man offered his hair to Haddon willingly, and a Danish bioethics review board saw no problem with sequencing his genome. Willerslev later received the blessing of a committee that represents Aboriginal people in the region where the man probably lived.<br /><br />An analysis of his genome indicates that his ancestors started their journey more than 60,000 years ago, branching off from humans who left Africa. The ancestors of contemporary Europeans and most other Asians probably went their separate ways less than 40,000 years ago, according to Willerslev’s team. <br /><br /><br /></p>
<p>He, and perhaps all aboriginal Australians, the genome indicates, descend from the first humans to venture far beyond Africa more than 60,000 years ago, and thousands of years before the ancestors of most modern Asians trekked east in a second migration out of Africa.<br /><br />“Aboriginal Australians are descendents of the first human explorers. These are the guys who expanded to unknown territory into an unknown world, eventually reaching Australia,” says Eske Willerslev, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, who led the study. It appears online in Science.<br /><br />Hanging on a hair<br />The oldest human remains in Australia date to around 50,000 years ago, and yet older stone tools found in India and elsewhere hint at an early southern migration of anatomically modern humans out of Africa and through India and Southeast Asia. <br /><br />However, genetic studies of contemporary Asians and Oceanians haven’t always told the same story. The most comprehensive genetic analysis carried out so far pointed to a single migration that spawned all Asian populations, including aboriginal Australians. But estimated times of the separation of European and Asian ancestors in this population does not chime well with the archaeological evidence for the continuous settlement of Australia from much earlier times.<br /><br />“These papers make an overwhelming case for multiple waves of migration.” A complete genome from an aboriginal Australian would settle this debate, Willerslev says. Many contemporary Aboriginal Australians also descend from Europeans because of recent interbreeding between Aboriginals and Australian colonists. To get a better picture of the ancient history of Aboriginals, Willerslev wanted to sequence the genome of someone who did not descend from Europeans.<br /><br />About a year ago, his team obtained a hair sample originally collected by the British ethnologist Alfred Cort Haddon. Historical records suggest that Haddon got the hair from a young Aboriginal man in the early 1920s while on a train journey from Sydney to Perth.<br /><br />Willerslev believes that the man offered his hair to Haddon willingly, and a Danish bioethics review board saw no problem with sequencing his genome. Willerslev later received the blessing of a committee that represents Aboriginal people in the region where the man probably lived.<br /><br />An analysis of his genome indicates that his ancestors started their journey more than 60,000 years ago, branching off from humans who left Africa. The ancestors of contemporary Europeans and most other Asians probably went their separate ways less than 40,000 years ago, according to Willerslev’s team. <br /><br /><br /></p>
