Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

Genetic Evidence

The only differences found is that the aborigines are unique in lacking blood groups A₂and B. The genetics of all humans is so similar that it has proven difficult to find any genetic distinction between the Australian Aborigines and other groups.  There was also no genetic connection to the Veddoid peoples of India and Sri Lanka, and the Ainu of Japan, groups which have been suggested in the past to be related to the Australian Aborigines.

Mitochondrial DNA shows a 3-way split between humans about 200 000 years ago into Africans, Caucasians and Australian-Oriental lineages. The problem with the mitochondrial DNA method is that it is not precise enough to detect changes over shorter periods.

The genetic evidence that found that Mungo Man (LM 3 or WLH 3) was not related to modern Australian Aborigines does not agree with the cultural evidence, such as burial practices evident in the Lake Mungo burial. see Continuity and Antiquity

Gregory J Adcock et al. at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies and John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University, Canberra, extracted mitochondrial DNA from the bones of the skeleton known as Lake Mungo 3 and compared it with that of ancient and modern Aborigines, the results indicated  that this lineage probably diverged before the most recent common ancestor of contemporary human mitochondrial genomes. So this individual was probably not in the direct line of descent of the Aborigines, or any other living people, belonging to a side branch that probably diverged from the line leading to other human groups. These findings have been disputed on several grounds, methodology, interpretation and the possibility that the sample was contaminated. (Colgan, 2001, Cooper et al., 2001; Groves, 2001; Trueman, 2001; but cf Adcock et a., 2001b,c). (Habgood & Franklin, 2008). If the results prove to be correct, it would indicate that the most divergent mtDNA would be from Australia, rather than Africa. (Habgood & Franklin, 2008).

Sources & Further reading

1. Josephine Flood, Archaeology of the Dreamtime, J. B. Publishing
2. Phillip J. Habgood & Natilie R. Franklin, The revolution that didn't arrive: A review of Pleistocene Sahul, Journal of Human Evolution, 55, 2008

Links

An Australasian test of the recent African origin theory using the WLH-50 calvarium