By DANI COOPER - ABC NEWS
Added: Fri, 23 Sep 2011 13:21:52 UTC

Thanks to mmurray for the link.

DNA sequencing of a 100-year-old lock of hair has established Aboriginal Australians have had a longer continuous association with the land than any other race of people.

Sequencing of a West Australian Aboriginal man's hair shows he was directly descended from a migration out of Africa into Asia that took place about 70,000 years ago.

The finding, published today in the journal Science, rewrites the history of the human species by confirming humans moved out of Africa in waves of migrations rather than in one single out-of-Africa diaspora.

The study is based on a lock of hair donated to British anthropologist Alfred Haddon by an Aboriginal man from the Goldfields region of Western Australia in the early 20th century.

The genome, shown to have no genetic input from modern European Australians, reveals the ancestors of the Aboriginal man separated from the ancestors of other human populations 64,000 to 75,000 years ago.

Aboriginal Australians therefore descend directly from the earliest modern explorers - people who migrated into Asia before finally reaching Australia.

Co-author Dr Joe Dortch, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia, says the work is significant because it shows the timeline for people in Australia is more than 50,000 years.

"So far there are no [archaeological] sites that are over 50,000 years old so it puts a time limit on that and focuses our future efforts," he said.

Dr Dortch believes the finding will foster a sense of pride in modern Australian Aborigines.

"No-one else in the world can say 'I am descended from people who have been here 75,000 years'."

Read on and view video

TAGGED: EVOLUTION, GENERAL INTEREST, HISTORY