Aboriginal Australians
Aboriginal Australians are the various indigenous peoples of the Australian mainland and many of its islands, excluding the ethnically distinct people of the Torres Strait Islands.
Humans first migrated to Australia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, and over time formed as many as 500 linguistic and territorial groups. In the past, Aboriginal people lived over large sections of the continental shelf. They were isolated on many of the smaller offshore islands and Tasmania when the land was inundated at the start of the Holocene inter-glacial period, about 11,700 years ago. Despite this, Aboriginal people maintained extensive networks within the continent and certain groups maintained relationships with Torres Strait Islanders and the Makassar people of modern-day Indonesia.
Over the millennia, Aboriginal people developed complex trade networks, inter-cultural relationships, law and religions, which make up some of the oldest continuous cultures in the world. At the time of European colonisation of Australia, the Aboriginal people spoke more than 250 different languages, possessed varying degrees of technology, and lived in various types of settlements. Languages and language-associated groups of people are connected with stretches of territory known as "Country", with which they have a profound spiritual connection.
Contemporary Aboriginal beliefs are shaped by traditional beliefs, the disruption of colonisation, religions brought to the continent by later migrants, and contemporary issues. Just over half hold secular or other spiritual beliefs or no religious affiliation; about 40% are Christian; and about 1% adhere to a traditional Aboriginal religion. Traditional cultural beliefs are passed down and shared through dancing, stories, songlines, and art that collectively weave an ontology of modern daily life and ancient creation known as the Dreaming.
Studies of Aboriginal groups' genetic makeup are ongoing, but evidence suggests that they have genetic inheritance from ancient Asian peoples. Aboriginal Australians and Papuans shared the same paleocontinent Sahul, although they became genetically distinct about 37,000 years ago. Aboriginal Australians have a broadly shared, complex genetic history, but only in the last 200 years have they been defined by others as, and started to self-identify as, a single group. Aboriginal identity has changed over time and place, with family lineage, self-identification, and community acceptance all of varying importance.
The shows that there were over 944,000 Aboriginal people, comprising 3.7% of Australia's population. Over 80% of Aboriginal people today speak English at home, and about 77,000 speak an Indigenous language at home. Aboriginal people, along with Torres Strait Islander people, suffer a number of severe health and economic deprivations in comparison with the wider Australian community.
Origins
Archeological evidence indicates that the ancestors of today's Aboriginal Australians first migrated to the continent 50,000 to 65,000 years ago. While there have been genomic studies placing arrival as late as 43,000 years ago, a 2025 study suggests that the peopling of Australia happened around 60,000 years ago, via two distinct routes.Early human migration to Australia was achieved when it formed a part of the Sahul continent, connected to the island of New Guinea via a land bridge. This would have nevertheless required crossing the sea at the Wallace Line. It is also possible that people came by island-hopping via an island chain between Sulawesi and New Guinea, reaching North Western Australia via Timor. As sea levels rose, the people on the Australian mainland and nearby islands became increasingly isolated, some on Tasmania and some of the smaller offshore islands when the land was inundated at the start of the Holocene, the inter-glacial period that started about 11,700 years ago.
A 2021 study by researchers at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage has mapped the likely migration routes of the peoples as they moved across the Australian continent to its southern reaches of what is now Tasmania. The modelling is based on data from archaeologists, anthropologists, ecologists, geneticists, climatologists, geomorphologists, and hydrologists. The new models suggest that the first people may have landed in the Kimberley region in what is now Western Australia about 60,000 years ago, and had settled across the continent within 6,000 years.
Aboriginal Australians may have one of the oldest continuous cultures on earth. In Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, oral histories comprising complex narratives have been passed down by Yolngu people through hundreds of generations. The Aboriginal rock art, dated by modern techniques, shows that their culture has continued from ancient times.
Genetics
Genetic studies have revealed that a population wave, termed East Eurasian Core, outgoing from the Iranian plateau during the Initial Upper Paleolithic period populated the Asia-Pacific region via a southern route dispersal. This wave is suggested to have expanded into the South and Southeast Asia region and subsequently diverged rapidly into the ancestors of Iranian Hunter Gatherers, Ancient Ancestral South Indians, Andamanese, East Asians, and Australasians, including Aboriginal Australians and Papuans. Aboriginal Australians are genetically most closely related to other Oceanians, such as Papuans and Melanesians, who are collectively referred to as "Australasians," which can be described as "a deeply branching East Asian lineage".While the commonly accepted date for the diversification of modern humans following the Out of Africa migration is placed at 60–50,000 years ago, there is, however, evidence that Aboriginal Australians may carry ancestry from an earlier human diaspora that originated 75,000 to 62,000 years ago. This earlier group has been estimated to have possibly contributed around 2% ancestry to modern Aboriginal Australians.
Mallick et al. 2016 and Mark Lipson et al. 2017 found the bifurcation of Eastern Eurasians and Western Eurasians dates to at least 45,000 years ago, with indigenous Australians nested inside the Eastern Eurasian clade. Aboriginal Australians, together with Papuans, may either form a sister clade to a single mainland Asian clade consisting of the AASI, Andamanese and East Asians, and to the exclusion of West Eurasians, or alternatively are nested within the Eastern Eurasian cluster without a strong internal cladal structure against mainland Asian lineages.
Genetic data on indigenous populations of Borneo and Malaysia showed them to be more closly related to other mainland Asian groups, than compared to the groups from Papua New Guinea and Australia. This indicates that populations in Australia were isolated for a long time from the rest of Southeast Asia. They remained untouched by migrations and population expansions into that area, which can be explained by the Wallace line.
Uniparentals
The most common Y-chromosome haplogroups among Aboriginal Australians is C1b2, followed by haplogroups S and M; these latter haplogroups are also very frequent among Papuans.Other studies
In a 2001 study, blood samples were collected from some Warlpiri people in the Northern Territory to study their genetic makeup. The study concluded that the Warlpiri are descended from ancient Asians whose DNA is still somewhat present in Southeastern Asian groups, although greatly diminished. The Warlpiri DNA lacks certain information found in modern Asian genomes, and carries information not found in other genomes. This reinforces the idea of ancient Aboriginal isolation.Genetic data extracted in 2011 by Morten Rasmussen et al., who took a DNA sample from an early-20th-century lock of an Aboriginal person's hair, found that the Aboriginal ancestors probably migrated through South Asia and Maritime Southeast Asia, into Australia, where they stayed. As a result, outside of Africa, the Aboriginal peoples have continuously occupied the same territory longer than any other human populations. These findings suggest that modern Aboriginal Australians are the direct descendants of the eastern wave, who left Africa up to 75,000 years ago.
The Rasmussen study also found evidence that Aboriginal peoples carry some genes associated with the Denisovans of Asia; the study suggests that there is an increase in allele sharing between the Denisovan and Aboriginal Australian genomes, compared to other Eurasians or Africans. Examining DNA from a finger bone excavated in Siberia, researchers concluded that the Denisovans migrated from Siberia to tropical parts of Asia and that they interbred with modern humans in Southeast Asia 44,000 years BP, before Australia separated from New Guinea approximately 11,700 years BP. They contributed DNA to Aboriginal Australians and to present-day New Guineans and an indigenous tribe in the Philippines known as Mamanwa. This study confirms Aboriginal Australians as one of the oldest living populations in the world. They are possibly the oldest outside Africa, and they may have the oldest continuous culture on the planet.
A 2016 study at the University of Cambridge suggests that it was about 50,000 years ago that these peoples reached Sahul. The sea levels rose and isolated Australia about 10,000 years ago, but Aboriginal Australians and Papuans diverged from each other earlier, genetically, about 37,000 years BP, possibly because the remaining land bridge was impassable. This isolation makes the Aboriginal people the world's oldest culture. The study also found evidence of an unknown hominin group, distantly related to Denisovans, with whom the Aboriginal and Papuan ancestors must have interbred, leaving a trace of about 4% in most Aboriginal Australians' genome. There is, however, increased genetic diversity among Aboriginal Australians based on geographical distribution.
Carlhoff et al. 2021 analysed a Holocene hunter-gatherer sample from South Sulawesi, which shares high amounts of genetic drift with Aboriginal Australians and Papuans. This suggests that a population split from the common ancestor of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans. The sample also shows genetic affinity with East Asians and the Andamanese people of South Asia. The authors note that this hunter-gatherer sample can be modelled with ~50% Australian/Papuan-related ancestry and either with ~50% East Asian or Andamanese Onge ancestry, highlighting the deep split between Leang Panninge and Aboriginal/Papuans.
Two genetic studies by Larena et al. 2021 found that Philippines Negrito people split from the common ancestor of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans before the latter two diverged from each other, but after their common ancestor diverged from the ancestor of East Asian peoples.
Based on a reevaluation of mitogenomes, Gandini et al. 2025 proposed a "long chronology", which suggested an earlier settlement of Sahul by two migration routes about ~60 ka. One route came from northern Sunda via the Philippine archipelago whilst the other came from southern Sunda via Mainland Southeast Asia, with both routes ultimately tracing back to South Asia. The settlers that undertook these routes were ancestral to populations indigenous to Australia, New Guinea and Oceania, and were also related to other East Eurasians instead of belonging to a separate wave.