DNA used to reconstruct Aboriginal history
It is a truism that the more we move into the future, the more we learn about the past. Over the last month or two, scientists have picked up on some extraordinary ancient history.
For example, a team of scientists has reconstructed the history of Australian Aboriginals. About 50,000 years ago, sea levels were so low that Aboriginal pioneers walked from South East Asia to northern Australia.
This happened once only, so all of today’s Aboriginals descend from the same lineage following their arrival so long ago.
The early migrants moved round coasts of the continent, reaching South Australia and Tasmania about 49,000 years ago.
How do we know this? The answer lies in DNA.
Between the 1920s and 1960s, anthropologists at Adelaide University mounted many expeditions to Aboriginal tribes all over Australia. They collected vast amounts of information about Aboriginal genealogy, languages, art, cosmology, ceremonies and so on.
The old collections are valuable because, at the time, most Aboriginals lived in their traditional areas and few had yet been forcibly moved to other places by the Government, and few had yet migrated from the land where they grew up and into cities.
Among the expeditions’ collections were 111 samples of Aboriginal hair. Over the last year or two, a team of 25 scientists at Adelaide University extracted DNA from the hair and from other contemporary Aborigines.
This enabled them to reconstruct the ancient history of these people.
The team was surprised to find that having migrated all round the Australian coasts from roughly Darwin to Tasmania, local tribes hunkered down and remained isolated in the same places for tens of thousands of years.
They stayed put despite huge climatic and cultural changes, changing plant cover, and radical changes in the food supply as Aborigines ate most of the largest edible animals to extinction.
The Aboriginal situation is in stark contrast to ancient history in Europe, Asia and America, where tribes or populations often migrated from place to place and interbred with their neighbours.
There’s a New Zealand twist to this research story as its team leader, Professor Alan Cooper hails from Eastbourne, Wellington, and graduated from Victoria University.
Cooper was something of a wunderkind, sorting the DNA of extinct moas at an early age, and subsequently using fossil DNA to cast light on extinct dodos, hyenas, cats, American lions, horses, bears, and bison, as well as fossil microbes in human skulls.
Giant penguins
Bones of a fossil penguin dug up near the Waipara River in North Canterbury found their way into Canterbury Museum’s collection. Staff member Pail Scofield and two foreign colleagues say that, at 60 to 61 million to years old, they are bones of the most ancient and the biggest penguin known to science.
It was so tall that it could look adult humans in the eye. The paleontologists think the giant bird is evidence that penguins must have swum through the meteoric catastrophe that put an end to the dinosaurs.