Roots of aboriginal Australian civilization extend to Africa 72,000 years ago

" The newly published paper is the first extensive DNA study of Aboriginal Australians, according to the University of Cambridge. Working in close collaboration with indigenous Australian elders and leaders, an international team of researchers obtained permission to extract DNA from the saliva of 83 Aboriginal Australians and 25 Papuans from New Guinea and sequence their complete genetic information.

While some scholars have theorized that indigenous Australians descended from a separate, earlier migration than that of Eurasian people, the study’s authors report that the majority of non-Africans stem from a single ancestral group of migrants who left Africa approximately 72,000 years ago and eventually spread across the other continents. While European and Asian ancestral groups became distinct in the genetic record around 42,000 years ago, the researchers say that occurred even earlier—approximately 58,000 years ago—in the case of indigenous Papuan and Australian ancestral groups as they ventured eastward." Read full article.