By detailing the landscape at the time of first humans’ migration into Australia, we can better understand how people travelled and where they settled.
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Articles on Sahul
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Our new study reveals a mosaic of habitable landscapes – now submerged by the ocean – once supported up to 500,000 people living in Australia’s northwest.
There’s no single reason many Asian animals spread to Australia but few went the other way – but climate, geography and the slow drift of tectonic plates all played a role.
Our work provides new evidence against the theory that people living in Sahul drove the megafauna extinction.
It took just 5,000 years for large and well-organised groups of people to populate all corners of the continent.
We now have a glimpse into where early Indigenous Australians likely travelled all those tens of thousands of years ago.
Archaeological discoveries in a jungle cave in central Indonesia suggest humans arrived there 18,000 years ago and decided to stay a while, hunting in the jungle and building canoes.
A drying climate and the arrival of people together finished off Australia’s megafauna.
Top contributors
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Research Fellow in Ecology for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University
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Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University
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Associate Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, UNSW Sydney
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Sean Ulm is a Friend of The Conversation.
Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures, James Cook University
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Research Fellow, Griffith University
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Distinguished Professor, School of Culture, History & Language, Australian National University
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Assistant Professor for Social-Environmental Modeling @ Utah State University and Associate Investigator ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage and ASU-SFI Biosocial Complex Systems Fellow, Santa Fe Institute
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R&D Manager for Autonomous Sensing & Perception (Sandia National Laboratories) and Research Assistant Professor of Anthropology (UTK), University of Tennessee
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Postdoctoral Researcher, Macroevolution and Macroecology Group, Australian National University
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PhD Candidate, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA)
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Associate Professor of Archaeological Science, Flinders University
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Professor, Southern Cross University
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Associate professor, University of Sydney
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Earth sciences researcher, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA)
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Professor in Archaeology, The University of Queensland
