One of the most extraordinary stories of human migration unfolded around 70,000 years ago, as humans crossed from Southeast Asia into modern-day Australia, traversing a now-submerged, Atlantis-like landscape, and becoming the first people to call that land home.
The research looks at the vast supercontinent that was known as Sahul, a landmass that was exposed about 70,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch, when Earth was in the midst of the last ice age. Glaciation caused declining sea levels that exposed areas of submerged continental shelf connecting what is now mainland Australia to Papua New Guinea in the north and Tasmania in the south.
The researchers used this information to develop a landscape evolution model, which simulated Sahul's changing landscape between 75,000 and 35,000 years ago. The simulation also incorporated possible migration routes from two locations in Southeast Asia — West Papua and the Timor Sea Shelf — as well as archaeological sites spread across the modern-day landscape.
"The new landscape evolution model allows for a more realistic description of the terrains and environments inhabited by the first hunter-gatherer communities as they traversed Sahul," Tristan Salles, an associate professor in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney and lead author of the study, said in a statement.
—Zealandia, Earth's hidden continent, was torn from supercontinent Gondwana in flood of fire 100 million years agoBy showing where Australia's first people most likely moved, the model may even provide archaeologists with some practical insights for their work.