By detailing the landscape at the time of first humans’ migration into Australia, we can better understand how people travelled and where they settled.
Before the colonists came, we managed the land with careful use of cool burns. To stop giant bushfires, we have to learn again how to care for country.
The policy, called Revive and funded by $286 million over four years, establishes Creative Australia which will be the government’s principle arts investment and advisory body
Indigenous artists have been engraving rock shelters for millennia - long before the Kimberley’s celebrated rock art paintings. Now the rocks’ natural coatings are yielding clues to the engravings’ creation.
Jo McDonald, The University of Western Australia and Peter Veth, The University of Western Australia
They were looking to study rock art at a remote desert site but what they found showed people had been using the place almost since the first people arrived in Australia.
Aboriginal Australians have effectively been on their country for as long as modern human populations have been outside of Africa. We have a limit as to how long ago that was: around 50,000 years.
It’s been half a century since Jim Bowler discovered Mungo Lady, which changed the course of Australian history. But now he says the find has fallen off the national radar, leaving a legacy of shame.
The first people to make it to Australia could have navigated their way by sea crossing, reaching the north-west coastline of the island continent more than 50,000 years ago.
There is plenty of debate over what route was taken by the first people to reach Australia. New research reveals a likely route through a now submerged chain of islands.
The evidence of a much earlier presence of humans in Indonesia was found more than 100 years ago. But only now has the age of the fossil teeth been accurately dated.
Sean Ulm, James Cook University; Ingrid Ward, Flinders University; Peter Veth, The University of Western Australia, and Tiina Manne, The University of Queensland
Part of the land inhabited by some of the early Australians is now submerged, but details of their life is now revealed in an excavation on an island off the continent’s north-west coast.
The extinction of the giant reptiles, marsupials and birds that once called Australia home has been the subject of much debate, including the role early Australians may have had on their fate.
New DNA research working with Indigenous Australians is answering many of the questions about when and where the First Australians emerged many thousands of years ago.
Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University