First Australians were Indian: research was the headline posted on The Sydney Morning Herald website on Thursday 23 July 2009.
Now that isn't exactly what is in the body of the newspaper article (which rather looks to be based on a media release) and it's definitely not what is in the published research Reconstructing Indian-Australian phylogenetic link.
What the researchers appear to be asserting is that early Australians were descended from out-of-Africa migration.
The complete mtDNA sequencing indicate that both Australians and New Guineans exclusively belongs to the out-of-Africa founder types M and N, thus ultimately descended from the same African emigrants ~50 to 70 kyBP, as all other Eurasians.
The researchers, who based their finding on the particular mtDNA sequences of 8 Indians and 6 Aboriginals, are postulating a migration journey which took the ancestors of Australia's traditional owners along what is known as the southern route (Horn of Africa to the Persian/Arabian Gulf and further along the tropical coast of the Indian Ocean to southeast Asia and Australasia) ~ 60 to 50 thousand years before the present day and that migration likely occurred before or at the beginning of N group population growth in pre-history India.
Pity that The Sydney Morning Herald decided on the colourful headline, the published research deserved better.
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