The ancestors of Indigenous Australians: How they settled and thrived since their beginning

Australia, the continent, wasn’t always Australia as we know it today.  Was settlement an accident, or something more deliberately planned? By which route – or routes – was the continent first settled, and when?

In just a matter of decades, as more and more sites of archaeological interest have been uncovered, scientists have worked to answer Australia’s ancient migration questions. 

Research into the subject published in recent years has been led by Professor Corey Bradshaw, an ecologist from Flinders University.  He’s an ecologist by training – not an archaeologist – but applying techniques from his work studying biological mechanisms, he set about using complex mathematics to model complex human systems.   These large stochastic models give scientists a tool to predict outcomes while accounting for a myriad of random variations over time.

“It’s a butterfly effect kind of idea: if you do this, what happens down the track?” he says. This cross-disciplinary research brought to Sahul, a mix of geomorphologists, climatologists and archaeologists together, to review a range of data on ancient migration to crunch the probable routes that people arrived on the continent.

Inference of human population changes in Sahul (Australia + New Guinea) is typically derived from point estimates of dated archaeological evidence and/or genetic differentiation inferred from modern genomes. However, the mechanisms driving large changes in these patterns is largely speculative. Using various mathematical approaches to marry disparate archaeological, climatological, landscape, and demographic data, he will present an emerging picture of how human populations arrived, expanded, and thrived in Sahul in response to broad-scale climate variation. He will also discuss some of the ecological and physical implications of this long-term settlement of Australia, and what they mean for Indigenous futures. 

Corey Bradshaw is the Matthew Flinders Professor Global Ecology at Flinders University where he leads the Global Ecology Laboratory and heads the Flinders Modelling Node of the Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (2017–2024) and the Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures (2024–2031). Previously, he was the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change at the University of Adelaide and an Australian Research Council (ARC) Level 3 Future Fellow, with former positions at the South Australian Research and Development Institute, Charles Darwin University, and the University of Tasmania. Corey has completed three tertiary degrees in ecology (BSc, MSc, PhD) from universities in Canada and New Zealand, and a Certificate in Veterinary Conservation Medicine from Murdoch University. He has published over 330 peer-reviewed scientific articles, 13 book chapters and 3 books, including The Effective Scientist (Cambridge University Press) and Killing the Koala and
Poisoning the Prairie (Chicago University Press).