NEW insights into how people first arrived in Australia have been revealed by a group of experts brought together to investigate the continent’s deep history. They used sophisticated modelling to determine not only the likely routes travelled by Aboriginal people tens of thousands of years ago, but also the sizes of groups required for the population to survive in harsh conditions.The research, published in two companion papers (one in Scientific Reports and the other in Nature Ecology and Evolution), confirms the theory that people arrived in several large and deliberate migrations by island-hopping to reach New Guinea more than 50,000 years ago.
