469 Facts about Aboriginals.

Aborigines

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The Worlds Oldest Inhabitants?

The word "aboriginal" means "the first" or "earliest known". The word was first used in Italy and Greece to describe people who lived there, natives or old inhabitants, not newcomers, or invaders.

Australia may well be the home of the worlds first people. Stone tools discovered in a quarry near Penrith, New South Wales, in 1971 show that humans lived in Australia at least twelve thousand years before they appeared in Europe.

So far three early sites have been discovered in Australia, the Penrith one being dated about forty-seven thousand years old, a Western Australian site forty thousand years old and another in Lake Mungo, New South Wales, thirty-five thousand years old.

To put this in perspective, so that we can appreciate the time scales, since the first fleet arrived in 1788 there have only been 8 generations of settlers. On the other hand, there have been in excess of 18,500 generations of aboriginals!!!

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Aborigines And Their Culture

More than 30,000 years ago the population of the world was small, and people lived in family groups, hunting, fishing and food gathering. There where no cultivated crops, animals were not herded for food and metalworking was yet to be discovered.

At that time, known as the last great Ice Age, Australia was joined to New Guinea. Islands such as Java and Borneo were larger than today, sea passages between them narrower. This made it possible for the ancestors of the people now called Australian Aboriginals to reach Australia from lands to the north.

It is not known from where the Aboriginals began their journey, but it is certain that people with some kind of water craft crossed the 100 - 160 kilometres stretches of water between the islands to the north; and reach the southern continent. This sea voyage is the earliest evidence of sea travel by prehistoric man. As the ice flows of the Ice Age began to melt, the sea level rose, isolating Australia, and making the sea passages too wide for crossing by the simple forms of watercraft available at the time. About 10,000 years ago, Tasmania became separated from the main land, thus isolating the people there, and about 5,000 years ago the Australian continent took on the shape of that it has today.

Nobody knows how long the Aboriginals took to reach Australia, or how they settled the continent when they arrived. At present archaeologists are searching ancient camping sites for evidence of their history, and each new discovery provides links in the history of the thousands of years before the white man reached the Great South Land. New discoveries also are changing previous ideas about the length of time that Aboriginals have been in Australia, and modern scientific methods of dating have provided new possibilities for further research. It is certain that man reached Australia more than 40,000 years ago. Australia, once called the "lost continent of prehistory", is fast losing that title.

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