Stochastic models support rapid peopling of Late Pleistocene Sahul
Bradshaw, Corey J.A., Norman, Kasih, Ulm, Sean, Williams, Alan N., Clarkson, Chris, Chadœuf, Joël, Lin, Sam C., Jacobs, Zenobia, Roberts, Richard G., Bird, Michael I., Weyrich, Laura S., Haberle, Simon G., O'Connor, Sue, Llamas, Bastien, Cohen, Tim J., Friedrich, Tobias, Veth, Peter, Leavesley, Matthew, and Saltré, Frédérik (2021) Stochastic models support rapid peopling of Late Pleistocene Sahul. Nature Communications, 12. 2440.
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Abstract
The peopling of Sahul (the combined continent of Australia and New Guinea) represents the earliest continental migration and settlement event of solely anatomically modern humans, but its patterns and ecological drivers remain largely conceptual in the current literature. We present an advanced stochastic-ecological model to test the relative support for scenarios describing where and when the first humans entered Sahul, and their most probable routes of early settlement. The model supports a dominant entry via the northwest Sahul Shelf first, potentially followed by a second entry through New Guinea, with initial entry most consistent with 50,000 or 75,000 years ago based on comparison with bias-corrected archaeological map layers. The model’s emergent properties predict that peopling of the entire continent occurred rapidly across all ecological environments within 156–208 human generations (4368–5599 years) and at a plausible rate of 0.71–0.92 km year−1. More broadly, our methods and approaches can readily inform other global migration debates, with results supporting an exit of anatomically modern humans from Africa 63,000–90,000 years ago, and the peopling of Eurasia in as little as 12,000–15,000 years via inland routes.
| Item ID: | 67947 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 2041-1723 |
| Copyright Information: | © The Author(s) 2021. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Funders: | Australian Research Council (ARC), Australian Government (AG) |
| Projects and Grants: | ARC Centre of Excellence grant (CE170100015), ARC fellowship FT120100656, ARC fellowship FL140100044, ARC fellowship FL130100116, ARC fellowship FT150100138, ARC fellowship FT160100242, ARC fellowship FT180100407, ARC fellowship FT170100448, AG Research Training Program Award |
| Date Deposited: | 04 May 2021 01:36 |
| FoR Codes: | 43 HISTORY, HERITAGE AND ARCHAEOLOGY > 4301 Archaeology > 430101 Archaeological science @ 50% 45 INDIGENOUS STUDIES > 4501 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture, language and history > 450101 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander archaeology @ 50% |
| SEO Codes: | 13 CULTURE AND SOCIETY > 1307 Understanding past societies > 130703 Understanding Australia’s past @ 100% |
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