Recent findings have proven that the oldest human beings outside the African continent otherwise known as the Aborigines were also the first people who set foot on the Australian soil, and later inhabited the land until now.
The discovery of an ancient wall painting in the Kimberley region of Western Australia stirred a debate among the anthropologists for past few decades regarding the first people on the Australian continent. These paintings apparently suggested a different sort of civilization inhabiting the region, people who seemed pretty different from Aborigines.
The rock paintings were named ‘Bradshaw rock’ and these paintings depict a different kind of art and a unique approach than all the other wall carvings discovered elsewhere in Australia. After analyzing these distinctive paintings, anthropologists came to the conclusion that these were carved by another race of people who arrived in Indonesia before the ancestors of the Aborigines settled in the region.
However latest findings suggest the otherwise, according to a biological anthropologist of Griffith University Dr. Michael Westaway, the theory that Aborigines were not the first people who inhabited Australia lacks crucial evidence. He is certain that the famous Bradshaw rock paintings were actually created by the Aborigines, and not by some unknown race of people. Dr. Westaway points towards the piles of DNA evidence that proves that ancestors of the modern Aborigines were the first people who left African continent some 75,000 years ago and arrived in Australia at least 50,000 years ago. In a recent interview, Dr. Westaway said that in the past there has been a number of hypotheses surrounding the Aborigines, however, the piles of DNA evidence conclusively proves that Aborigines were, in fact, the first inhabitants of Australia, and others arrived in the subsequent times. (Mail Online)
In 2011, a team led by evolutionary biologist Eske Willerslev, the director of the Centre for Ancient Genetics at the University of Copenhagen, suggested that the Australian Aborigines are without a shred of doubt one of the oldest human cultures on the entire planet.
The discovery of the peculiar wall arts in the Kimberley region by Joseph Bradshaw in 1891 gave birth to the notion that there is a possibility that Aborigines were not the first humans on the Australian continent. This theory came into being purely due to the unique nature of the art, but later research on the Bradshaw rock revealed that these were only 20,000 years old at best. Whereas, scores of other archaeological findings elsewhere in Australia connect Aborigines with Australia in the times 50,000 years in the past. Cleary all the scientific findings point towards the fact that Australia historically belonged to Aborigines, and it is about time to put all the other less scientific hypotheses to rest.
H/T Daily Mail