Although the times when Homo sapiens reached Australia are under revision, the latest data suggests that they arrived between 45,000 and 60,000 years ago—about the time that our species left Africa for parts east. And although changes in water levels made it easier to get to Australia by water then now humans still had to use boats of a kind. What kind of boats they used is a mystery.
But there are a number of other questions that remain about the colonization of Australia. How many colonizations were there? Did any of the colonizing H. sapiens carry genes from H. erectus? How much genetic material in the colonists came from Denisovans? (There are some suggestions of both of these possibilities based on aspects of skull morphology.) Did the aboriginal colonists evolve in the last 50,000 years? Regardless of how many colonizations were there, what was the population structure of indigenous people since they arrived here? And based on artifacts, what were the cultures of the early indigenous people?
All of this can be studied not just by digging up skull or artifacts, but also now by genetic testing: looking a “fossil DNA” from specimens. Unfortunately, what is happening in the U.S. and Canada is also happening in Australia: people who identify as “aboriginal” (and you can do this by self-identification, not necessarily by ancestry) are preventing the scientific study of skulls and artifacts by claiming that fossils or artifacts were from their ancestors, even though, as in the U.S., determination of “ancestry” of fossil remains can be dubious. Further, some indigenous people living today want to know their history, but are blocked by the reburial policy adopted by the some state governments. Further, many people recognized as aboriginals today also claim that their ancestors have been in Australia forever, and don’t want data that dispels the myth.
The article below, in Palladium Magazine, recounts the tremendous loss to science of specimens that, even without firm ancestral documentation, get reburied without study. This is even true of material found in the Willandra Lakes region of New South Wales, which is in fact a World Heritage Site and contains important human remains:
The Willandra Lakes Region is a World Heritage Site in the Far West region of New South Wales, Australia. The Willandra Lakes Region is the traditional meeting place of the Muthi Muthi, Ngiyampaa and Paakantyi Aboriginal peoples. The 2,400-square-kilometre (930 sq mi) area was inscribed on the World Heritage List at the 5th Session of the World Heritage Committee in 1981.
The Region contains important natural and cultural features including exceptional examples of past human civilization including the world’s oldest evidence of cremation. . . .’
. . . . Aboriginal people lived on the shores of the Willandra Lakes from 40,000 to 35,000 years ago. It is one of the oldest known human occupation sites in Australia. There is abundant evidence of Aboriginal occupation over the last 10,000 years.
Interesting and controversial fossils like WLH-50 have been found in Willandra, but now many fossils are being reburied, and fossils found weathering out of that region cannot be excavated or studied scientifically.
Click the headline to read the article:
I’ll give some quotes to apprise you of the situation. In toto, it seems that the study of human evoution (not, as the title implies, “evolutionary science”) is dying in Australia. But there are many other creatures besides humans, including the many marsupials.
Quots from the article are indented, while bold headings are mine:
Possible evolutionary change from the earliest inhabitants until now:
As more fossilized remains were discovered [after WWI], sometimes hidden within collections of recent bones, comparisons could be drawn between ancient Australians and the ones first encountered by Europeans. While sharing some skeletal similarities with recent populations, ancient individuals were often distinguished by “heavy-boned faces, enormous teeth and jaws, receding foreheads and flask-shaped skulls.” The mosaic of modern and archaic traits, seen to a lesser degree in contact-era skulls, emphasized the importance of these fossils to evolutionary history. The largest collections included Kow Swamp (c. 20,000 years old), Coobool Creek (c. 14,000 years old) and Willandra Lakes (c. 43,000 to c.14,000 years old).
One exceptional specimen was designated “Willandra Lakes Human 50,[WLH-50] also known as Garnpung Man. It shared traits with Javan Homo erectus and was more similar to ancient humans from Skhūl Cave in Israel than contact-era Australian foragers. At an estimated 26,000 years old, it may have had significantly more Denisovan ancestry than the 2-4% seen in recent Melanesians and Australian foragers.
The morphological variability seen in the fossil record led some researchers to hypothesize multiple migrations into Australia, with some genes coming from Homo erectus and some from ancient Chinese Homo sapiens. Others argued for local adaptation of a single Homo sapiens founding population. This debate featured significantly in the global discourse between proponents of “multiregional evolution,” which claims that modern Homo sapiens evolved simultaneously in multiple parts of the world, versus the “Recent Out of Africa” theory, which holds that Homo sapiens first evolved in Africa and then spread into Europe and Asia, replacing older human species.
What made these collections particularly valuable was their status as a comparative series. The ability to compare a group’s average morphology across eras and regions allowed scientists to track evolutionary changes and adaptations in ways that singular remains could not.
Who counts now as “aboriginal”? Bolding in the text below is mine.
Today, three separate groups are often conflated under the single term “Aboriginal.” These are:
- The ancient humans who first settled the continent.
- The contact-era foragers encountered by British colonists.
- The citizens currently classified as “Aboriginal” by the government.
This third category was formed when Australia’s 1967 constitutional referendum empowered the federal government to make laws for people of the “aboriginal race.” The government subsequently changed its definition of Aboriginal from requiring over 50% forager ancestry to a new standard based on self-identification, any degree of biological descent, and community recognition. This pivotal change meant even those with minimal forager ancestry could join the Aboriginal “class.” A separate legal class, “Torres Strait Islanders,” was eventually split off, with both classes now subclasses of the “Indigenous” slash “First Nations” class.
Before 1967, “Aboriginal” was a legal class with restricted rights. To avoid stigma, many mixed-descent Australians kept their forager ancestry a secret. But as membership criteria relaxed, and additional rights and privileges granted, more people publicly claimed forager ancestry. The Indigenous population exploded and is still growing faster than birth rates can explain. This is the result of people joining the class as adults, sometimes inspired by family legends or personal conviction. Also notable is that most Indigenous-class Australians marry non-Indigenous-class partners, but 90% of children from these unions are assigned Indigenous at birth. Archaeologist Josephine Flood observes that “Many people who identify as Aboriginal have white skin, blue eyes, narrow noses and blond, brown or red hair. Others resemble Japanese, Chinese, Melanesians, Polynesians, or Afghans.” In 2015, a government official estimated that 15% of Indigenous citizens had no forager ancestry whatsoever.
This of course means that many people can have a claim to have ancient aboriginal ancestry, and then bring lawsuits against scientists taking and studying skulls. There need be no genetic evidence of ancestry to bring such suits, as the genetic ancestry has been muddied by state-specific laws that prevent the study and excavation of the skulls or DNA analysis.
Not all human remains or artifacts must be repatriated: WLH-50, for example, is still in the hands of scientists. But AI says this about laws, and I’ve verified the claims by looking at several other sites:
In Australia, laws prohibit the burial of Aboriginal ancestral remains, sometimes referred to as fossils, by anyone other than the relevant Aboriginal community with traditional or familial linkes to them. The legal and ethical framework is centered on the principle of repatriation: the return of ancestral remains from museums, universities, and private collections back to their Traditional Owners for culturally appropriate care and reburial.This system is governed by a combination of federal and state or territory legislation.
Reburials began en masse in the 1980s, though there were some that were earlier. Now, it seems, the Australian government, perhaps infused with a view of the “sacralization of the oppressed,” seems ready to rebury fossils and artifacts in view of simple and poorly documented claims. And given the difference in time between modern aboriginals living in the same area as ancient aboriginals, the claim of “ancestry” giving one rights over fossils from tens of thousands of years ago seems weak, especially because no genetics is involved. But it’s strong enough to overrule the scientists:
By 1984, the massive Murray Black skeletal collection had been transferred following legal action by the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and, in 1985, remains of thirty-eight foragers were buried in a public ceremony in Melbourne’s Kings Domain park.
The movement now targeted fossilized remains with only tenuous connections to contact-era foragers. The ancient skulls from Eagle Hawk Neck and Mount Cameron West (c. 4260 years old) were transferred to the TAC in 1988 and cremated. In Victoria, the Coobool Creek collection was reburied in 1989, followed a year later by the Kow Swamp collection. In 1991, Alan Thorne voluntarily surrendered Mungo Lady, the first individual excavated at Willandra Lakes. During the handover, he implored the 3TTG (Three Traditional Tribal Groups) to preserve the fossils for future generations.
But as the voices of opposition grew weaker, the burials continued: in 2022, both Mungo Man and Mungo Lady were reburied, secretly. The final blow came in March 2025 when the rest of the Willandra Lakes collection, 106 fossilized individuals, was buried in an unmarked grave, despite a last-minute legal appeal from Gary Pappin, a local Mutthi Mutthi man, and efforts by archaeologist Michael Westaway, who compared it to the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. As of this year, Australia’s human fossil record, as well as the biological history of many extinct contact-era populations, has been effectively erased.
The rationale for reburial is weak, and even involves the supernatural. Get a load of this:
In general, the activists won the war of words. They used language that bolstered ownership claims like “repatriation,” “return,” and “ancestors,” which implied already-proven connections. While scientists used rigorous but dry terminology, activists referred to bones as “our Old People” whose “spirits cannot rest,” claiming that the mere existence of museum collections caused unverifiable harms like “cultural trauma.” Opponents who accepted this linguistic frame found it hard to argue without appearing callous.
Michael Mansell soon took the campaign overseas, convincing European institutions to hand over remains they had acquired during the colonial period. By the 2000s, the removal movement had won widespread support from museums, governments, and even previously-opposed archaeologists. This shift in attitudes resulted in formal policies and funding that allowed the transfer of thousands of forager remains to Aboriginal-class organizations.
The upshot is indeed the dying of ancient human anthropology in Australia. Even new Willandra Lakes fossils, which are important ones, cannot be removed or studied:
Happily, local Aboriginal land councils have allowed a few accidental discoveries to be briefly studied and dated, such as Kiacatoo Man (c. 27,000 years old), the largest Pleistocene skeleton ever found in Australia. But no intentional excavations have taken place for decades. At the Willandra Lakes UNESCO World Heritage Site, fossilized skulls are occasionally observed eroding from the ground but study is forbidden and they soon disintegrate.
According to archaeologist Colin Pardoe in 2018, “The repatriation of skeletal collections has meant that student access to teaching collections containing Australian material has become almost impossible…. This has resulted in researchers moving into other fields or other parts of the world.” And Vesna Tenodi explains, “Replicas or even drawings cannot be displayed, or discussed, as that also is too offensive without ‘Aboriginal permission.’”
Replicas and drawings have been forbidden in the U.S. too, as Elizabeth Weiss documents. She wasn’t even allowed to photograph the boxes containing fossil bones found in the U.S.! The article continues
Other archaeologists note that “fieldwork in Australia essentially ground to a halt as much of the modern debate over the origins of modern humans was beginning to take shape.” Just as DNA analysis, 3D imaging, and other revolutionary techniques were entering the field, the fossil record of an entire continent was wiped clean. Only a handful of specimens were ever studied by geneticists. Archaeologist Steve Webb estimated that the Pleistocene series from Willandra Lakes contained 38 individuals suitable for DNA testing. But that analysis was never done and the window of opportunity has now closed.
This kind of “anthropological activism” has been extensively documented by Elizabeth Weiss in other countries (see her books here), and the power of indigenous peoples to impede scientific study is strong. They have tried compromises in Australia, like allowing scientists to study remains over 7,000 years old, but these have failed. And there is virtually no possibility of compromise in the United States or Canada.
Now that these activists have acquired most of Australia’s human fossils and bones, they have expanded their removal and censorship campaigns to “include the return of cultural heritage materials, including objects, photographs, manuscripts, and audio-visual recordings.” Each concession leads to more expansive claims rather than resolution. They claim ownership over what questions can be asked about the past and the very words that can be used to ask them.
And the same script is being followed in Canada and the United States, with Indigenous-class activists reburying ancient remains and artifacts under NAGPRA legislation, censoring photographs, and even asserting ownership over dinosaur fossils based on creationist mythology. In 2017, the 9,000 year-old fossil Kennewick Man was buried after years of controversy. In Europe as well, museums and universities face shrinking collections and pressure to censor information.
Everyone agrees that the loss of ancient hominin fossils during World War II was a tragedy. Someday, hopefully, they will feel the same way about the artifacts and fossils currently being destroyed.
The future. As the article notes, not every state government has bowed to these demands, and some museums are refusing to surrender their collections. Other people are trying to forge productive relationships between “colonists” and modern aboriginals to permit research, including DNA research. More compromises could be forged that allow at least some scientific study, including extraction of DNA, which takes only a bit of earbone, before remains are reburied. But governments have been all too timorous to stand up to the increasingly strong demands of modern aboriginals to force reburial. In the absence of demonstrating recent ancestral-descendant relationships between modern and older aboriginals, or to set cutoffs to allow study of older remains, science should trump mythology. In the end, this seems to be more about power than anything else.
h/t: Coel, Luana
Maybe it’s time for a clandestine group of scientists to take small samples from as many specimens as possible and preserve them somewhere in the unlikely -but still possible- future where such silliness is seen as silliness. In that fanciful future people will see scientific questions as just questions about facts, not about how we should behave. This could be possible if, say, it is restricted to taking small bits for DNA analysis to get as much as sequencing data as can be done on the sample. Once that data is acquired, it will be much easier to keep intact in a safe place until its legal to study it.
Alas, my silly ‘movie script’ idea can’t happen. It is hopeless. What we do with facts is so often confused with obtaining them that I, once convinced that humans were rational and intelligent, now know otherwise. That future I dreamed of above is a fantasy. Someone here at WEIT said the other day, wrt to circumcision, that future humans will look back appalled at us for the practice. I agree (sort of). Same thing will happen about many things….global warming (we knew it was happening, we knew we were causing it, we knew what do do about it, but we did -and are doing- nothing)… the list goes on and on. If there is a civilized future for humanity we will have rejected all the nonsense (religious, political, whatever) that has plagued us for too long. But that future is not coming. Something else, much sadder, is. I believe the species will survive far longer than will civilization.
I wouldn’t be surprised it’s being done.
I hope so but we shouldn’t have to “Ocean’s 11” to preserve humanity’s patrimony from woke fanatics who can prove no relations to the 40,000 year old remains.
D.A.
NYC
(sorry for late reply, email issues)
Yeah. I have no issues that in the past legit burial grounds were ransacked almost indiscriminately though and the remains used not so much to trace human origin but to try and show how we’re all different.
This was usually by private museums let by rich elites (think the snobs in Titanic) to justify their position as above the lower class and the lower white class above the rest.
Ironically Franz Boas worked that out 120 years ago and for that got elbowed out of the American Museum of Natural History which was about as rich elite run as possible.
It’s president Henry Osborn then had eugenics events there. He was blue blood, rich and not even much of a scientist by the standards of the time but had the money.
The extremes switched sides, nothing new. Damage done and as before, those in the middle get pushed out.
Dumb general question :
I know that Neil Shubin used (in my own words) calculations to predict the maximum likelihood location of Tiktaalik. That was a while ago.
Can “AI” predict such things for these problems, and how detailed?
Why not use LIDAR, or other such “non-touch” methods?
I imagine the combined information could give rich predictions. So maybe even be able to say “OK, these are skulls, they should have such and such DNA, etc., “
You still have to do the work, and remember, you can’t excavate new material in most places. And you can’t get DNA without drillinginto the skull.
Hmmm
Can the soil adjacent to a skull (for instance) contain enough DNA from the decomposed soft tissues? That’d be amazing.
The soil is Mother Earth and to interfere with Her will rile ancestral spirits and cause heartbroken trauma among the aboriginal.
When they’re both making stuff up and claiming increasing levels of victimization, there can be no compromise. It won’t stop until “I don’t care” is seen as rigorous honesty instead of gratuitous brutality.
It’s all about power. We know you want this but we won’t let you have it. IMHO.
No, DNA degrades in soil. It is drilled out of an encapsulated earbone, which somewhat preserves it.
😃 did not know that!
I’m gonna make sure my earbone is in tip-top shape for posterity…
Earbone!… wow!
I read his book, in which he merely described the usual criteria for finding fossils: rocks of the right type (sedimentary rocks), the right age, exposed and perhaps not previously explored. More advanced fossil-finding strategies using ML/AI to find potential fossil sites or even spot individual fossils have not become prevalent yet.
Thanks
Needless to say, the theory of evolution itself informs us that animal fossils are our
own “old ones”, or related to them. Surely, we need to take them all out of museums and academic collections for ritual reburial, so as to avoid our own “cultural trauma”.
Except, of course, for the other part of pop-Left doctrine: that those of European descent have no ancestry or biology at all, just blank-slate formation by such horrors as heteronormativity, capitalism, “systemic” systems of oppression, and the general lack of “Social Justice” endured since before post-modernists deconstructed it all.
Why can’t science-minded native Australians countersue for scientists to have access to the fossils and relics? E.g. “Fossil X is my ancestor too and I want scientific information about my progenitors.
(By “native Australian” I take it you mean an aboriginal, not just someone who was born there.) Such an individual would be ostracized by his tribe. To the extent that the tribal leadership controls his access to tribal resources and government welfare as enabled by Australian Aboriginal policy, he could be severely disadvantaged and even his physical safety could be threatened. These are tribal societies, don’t forget, with easy resort to violence and intimidation, kind of like a motorcycle gang, which many literally are.) This is a power thing for them, just as it is in Canada. Bucking the chief and his leadership clique of cronies is just not a wise thing to do.
Aboriginals in Australia aren’t really motorbike gang guys.
The power here is all political, captured by the woke here in the USA, in Canada and Oz.
cheers Leslie,
D.A.
NYC
But, of course, threats to science come entirely from Trump and the “right”, and we’re not allowed to talk about anything else.
Oppressed / traumatised bullies are still bullies. Petty tyrants are still tyrants.
Thaaaank you, PCC(E) for providing a platform for this madness which too few people know about. I’m a big Mungo fan and have corresponded with him. He is an American living in Australia, the opposite of me, and a top notch guy.
In the few years I’ve been following and reading him he has taught me more about Aboriginal history/society than my entire 15 years of education and life IN AUSTRALIA!
For scientists, or just normal people, this Khmer Rouge type destruction of humanity’s genetic patrimony at the alter of woke is… incredible. A travesty.
The excellent Prof. Elizabeth Weiss @eweissunburied – whom you were at the Stamford conference with, is on a similar track in the American context.
best,
D.A.
NYC
@DavidandersonJd
How do the Aboriginal people prove they didn’t arrive in Australia a few years (10s not hundreds) before the Europeans unless they allow proper investigations?
They just have to say so. That’s, fundamentally, what indigenous ways of knowing just are. Of course before scientists arrived, no aboriginal anywhere had the faintest clue how long his people had been where the scientists found them. (And neither did any European beyond his written history including the Bible, until scientists started unlocking the age of the earth and the age and evolution of humanity.)
“Many moons ago”, even though if said with the wrong tone of voice sounds like a racial slur, is pretty close to as accurate a chronology as a pre-literate, pre-numerate civilization could supply. There might be oral tales of people arriving in boats….or the boat tales might have sprung up after the Dutch arrived in theirs: “So that’s how our ancestors got here!” Or there might be no surviving oral accounts of arrival at all. “How long have your people been here?” “I dunno. Never thought about it. Forever I guess.” Much later when temporal primacy became politically useful, “forever” carried real cachet. I’m not sure that all aboriginals in the interior of Australia would even be aware there was a seacoast or the concept of navigating on the sea from somewhere else. (The Polynesians reached New Zealand two dozen millennia later, and they weren’t Australian.)
Yes.
D.A.
NYC
The Polynesians must have reached Australia at some point a few thousand years ago. They contributed a lot to the genetics of the Melanisian island groups just to the north of Australia, it seems strange that they are not represented more prominently within the Australian record.
Perhaps they landed, saw the spiders and got back on their canoes.
Bones of contention! when really it should be, bones of knowledge!
Via science I live again, reaching out from my deep past to speak to my future ancestors, my journey has ended I can rest.
This really makes my blood boil. It’s a crime, and the acquiescence of governments and universities in it shames them. The institutions that should have been stepping in to prevent this deeply anti-intellectual madness have instead betrayed their responsibility by enabling it.
This is truly unfortunate. One might hope that a campaign to convince aboriginal peoples of Australia (including those who are aboriginal only by self-identification) to partner with scientists could work—unless they fear what scientists might learn. I don’t see any other way to be able to do physical anthropology in Australia without cooperation of the aboriginals. The same is probably true everywhere that indigenous peoples demand control over artifacts they believe to be under their purview. It seems that one should be able to respect the rights of indigenous peoples and conduct archeological research at the same time. Or are the two really incommensurable?
The archeology is likely to say (both in Australia and North America) that, no, they have not always been there, that their ancestors migrated there (just as later Europeans did), that their ancestors were only one of several waves of migration by “indigenous” peoples (and likely their ancestors were not the first), and that likely the different waves fought, massacred and dispossessed each other (and hence that their ancestors were likely no better than Europeans in such regards). All of this is unlikely to be popular with them.
Here’s the fraudulence at play here: Most people one would recognize as Aborigines in Australia hardly have a dog in this fight. They seem to not care, they have other concerns, many.
This is being moved by a group of voracious (Swedish looking!) “aboriginal claimants” – who never speak any Aboriginal languages at all, and a few actual paid off Aboriginal toadies… to stick it to the rest of the country.
The story of public lands being set aside and actually captured by these tireless grifters is also astounding. As you can imagine I keep an eye on these issues (albeit from afar.)
D.A.
NYC
We could use analyses in the social psychology of how/why museums, admins, governments, professional associations, etc. give in to claims of this sort. It relates to the mysterious coddling of the pronoun fetish, the indulgence of the
“affirmative care” movement, and the considerable woke infection of medical schools and associations. What is the psychiatric basis of hugely increased receptivity, in just the last 15 years or so, to any claim of victimhood? Some connect it to the feminization of academia, particularly in some administrative arenas, but I suspect that a larger psychological trend is under way; however, I cannot see what it is.
If anybody figures out a way to monetize these remains, a black market will arise. That’s how prohibitions work. This won’t be good for science either.
“Archaeologist Josephine Flood observes that “Many people who identify as Aboriginal have white skin, blue eyes, narrow noses and blond, brown or red hair. Others resemble Japanese, Chinese, Melanesians, Polynesians, or Afghans.”
Here’re a couple of aboriginal ladies – they’re GuriNgai sisters. Not sure where the GuriNgai hail from here in Oz.
https://www.pbsfm.org.au/news/rock-bye-baby-charlie-needs-braces-hawthorn-arts-centre
Beam me up, Scotty…..
As for how the ancestors of Australia’s original people arrived in Australia: there’s quite a lot of evidence for Neanderthals travelling to islands in the Mediterranean, which would require boats and not just swimming. And not just being washed into the ocean in a storm and hanging onto a mat of vegetation which was subsequently washed ashore in a distant location. (That’s the “Oceanic Dispersal” theory in case you didn’t recognize it.)
That’s not to say that Neanderthals are the original people’s ancestors, of course. It just suggests that those ancestors also had boat-using technology 50,000-ish years ago. So what’s missing? Evidence of boats in SE Asia at that time, of course. But there’s evidence of people (in the broad sense) getting to distant islands in the area, and that’s the kind of evidence being used to explain those ancient boats in the Mediterranean. And wooden boats don’t fossilize well, which explains why none from that era have been found.
In 1980 there were in the low hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal people in Oz, and their reproduction rate is approximate to Aussies generally. (except childless me!) 🙂
Last year there were one million. (While numbers of speakers of the 400 or so Aboriginal languages hasn’t budged.)
How about that?
In the last 50 years or so there have been massive monetary transfers to anybody who presents – or claims aboriginality. It is a deeply profitable grift.
D.A.
NYC
While non African humans do contain introgressed neanderthal and (for East and South East Asians) denisovan ancestry, there is a distinct reason to suspect that we have not inherited homo erectus ancestry, at least during encounters, if they occurred, within the past million years.
This is due to the dating of the chromosomal fusion we see on human chromosome 2, to about 1 million years ago. This is present in humans, neanderthals and denisovans and the split between these groups occurred some time between 800,000 to 500,000 years ago. Homo erectus fossils are older than this and even if members of this group survived late enough to encounter humans or even neanderthals or denisovans (Homo floresienses perhaps in island south east asia) there may have been a fertility barrier due to chromosomal differences.
Of course, there may have been introgression events in the ancestors of humans and neanderthals/denisovans prior to the fusion event but we don’t (yet) have Homo erectus genomic DNA to help identify this – which is how we identified the neanderthal/denisovan introgressions. By the way, the reason that the fusion event was able to be propogated in the first place was presumably due to some isolated inbreeding population, a situation that would allow segregation of the fused chromosome in the progeny without loss or duplication.