New DNA technology has confirmed Aboriginal Australians as the continent’s first people

(9News Australia)

New DNA technology has confirmed Aboriginal Australians as the continent’s first people – rebuking findings by a 2001 paper on remains found near Lake Mungo in far western New South Wales.

Professor David Lambert from Griffith University along with his colleagues used new DNA sequencing methods to re-analyse the mitochondrial DNA extracted from the 40,000-year-old fossils found near Lake Mungo, by Australian National University’s Dr Greg Adcock in 200

“There was a lot of suspicion at the time amongst a lot of international researchers in ancient DNA that there was a distinct possibility the results were due to contamination,” Professor Lambert said.

“The reason for the suspicion was that the sequences for Mungo Man, in particular, were very unusual … and gave rise to the thought that Aboriginal people were not in fact the first Australians — that there was a group there before them and that Aboriginal people displaced them.

“We could not, with better technology, repeat what the original study found and therefore the evidence that Aboriginal people were not the first Australians has no foundation.”

As part of the study, the Griffith University team also completed a mitochondrial genome from an ancient Aboriginal person.

“The advantage of this technology — we can identify the human sequences in there, the viral sequences, and the bacterial sequences and get a better idea if there really is endogenous DNA left in that bone,” Professor Lambert said.

Aboriginal elder Mary Pappin, of the Muthi Muti people gave permission for researchers to access Mungo Man.

“I didn’t think Australian Aborigines weren’t the first people… but anything that supports us in any way is good,” Ms Pappin said.

The latest findings were today published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

© ninemsn 2016

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