IT’S WELL KNOWN that First Nations people first arrived on the Australian continent more than 65,000 years ago. Since then, landscapes have changed dramatically after an ice age reshaped the land and oceans rose to isolate Australia from its nearest neighbours. At the same time, First Australians dispersed to every corner of the country – from the rugged coastlines to the mountains and the deep central deserts. As they did so, their culture expanded and diversified, changing with the surrounding land as hundreds of languages and unique cultural groups emerged. Alongside that cultural diversification, it seems logical to expect that a prominent genetic diversity developed between groups. And that is exactly what genomic researchers have discovered.
A recent study by the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics (NCIG), based at the Australian National University, in Canberra, analysed genetic samples from four Indigenous communities and
