New insights on ancient people movements in the super-continent of Sahul

Revealing the Indigenous superhighways of ancient Australia. Credit: Megan Hotchkiss Davidson/Sandia National Laboratories

From Phillip Adams’ “little wireless program”, Late Night Live on Radio National

The ancient continent of Sahul was comprised of Australia and PNG, when sea levels were much lower.  It’s to this continent that the ancestors of Australian Aboriginal people came. 

But new technology and modelling suggest it was not just a trickle of people that moved here over a long period of time. 

It was an organised, mass migration – and it seems they fanned out across the continent relatively quickly. 

Guest: Corey Bradshaw, Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology at Flinders University. Lead author of this study for the Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage

Aboriginal cave art at Uluru, Central Australia. The modellers of ancient people movements in Sahul have been able to compare their data to rock art and archaeological sites.

Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images