Introduction

Aboriginal Australians form the various indigenous peoples of the Australian mainland and many of its islands such as Tasmania, Fraser Island, Hinchinbrook Island, the Tiwi Islands, and Groote Eylandt, but excluding the Torres Strait Islands. The term Indigenous Australians refers to Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders collectively. It is generally used when both groups are included in the topic being addressed. Torres Strait Islanders are ethnically and culturally distinct, despite extensive cultural exchange with some of the Aboriginal groups. The Torres Strait Islands are mostly part of Queensland but have a separate governmental status. Aboriginal Australians comprise many distinct peoples who have developed across Australia for over 50,000 years. These peoples have a broadly shared, though complex, genetic history, but only in the last 200 years have they been defined and started to self-identify as a single group. Australian Aboriginal identity has changed over time and place, with family lineage, self-identification and community acceptance all being of varying importance. As role models, Aboriginal Australians occupy a full range of positions in society, with an incomplete set of lists of Indigenous Australians.

Before European settlement of Australia, there were around 600 diverse Aboriginal populations, based on language groups. Australian Aboriginals have the longest continuous cultural history of any group of people on earth. Educated estimates date this history around 50,000 years. Tot de ontdekking van Australië door de Europeanen. Op dat moment, in 1770, leefden er naar schatting tussen de 250.000 en 300.000 Aboriginals.

At the beginning of the twentieth century an Aboriginal man from the Goldfields region in Western Australia gave a lock of hair to a British anthropologist. Now, one century later, researchers isolated his DNA from his hair in order to isolate the genome of the first Australians so as to shine some light on the early spread of the modern man (Homo sapiens) on our planet. The genome, which did not contain any influences of modern European Australians, shows that the ancestors of the Aboriginal man must have split from other human populations between 75.000 and 64.000 years ago. This is to say that the Australian Aboriginals date from the first modern explorers, who via Asia set foot in Australia some 50.000 years ago. This research shows that the Aboriginals are the only population outside Africa which has the longest relation with the land on which they live today.

In the past, Aboriginal Australians lived over large sections of the continental shelf and were isolated on many of the smaller offshore islands and Tasmania when the land was inundated at the start of the Holocene inter-glacial period, about 11,700 years ago. Studies regarding the genetic make-up of Aboriginal groups are still ongoing, but evidence has suggested that they have genetic inheritance from ancient Asian but not more modern peoples, sharing some similarities with Papuans, but have been isolated from Southeast Asia for a very long time

In the 2016 Australian Census, indigenous Australians comprised 3.3% of Australia's population, with 91% of these identifying as Aboriginal only, 5% Torres Strait Islander, and 4% both. They also live throughout the world as part of the Australian diaspora.