Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Modern Humans Reached Australia 50,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

The migration of the first settlers to Sahul 60,000 years ago.

Photo: Helen Farr and Erich Fisher.

New genetic research supports “long chronology” for first settlement of Sahul - University of Huddersfield

Two recent papers by teams that included members of the Archaeogenetics Research Group at the University of Huddersfield, UK, show how modern DNA extraction and sequencing techniques are adding yet another independent line of evidence in support of the Theory of Evolution and against creationism. Together, they reveal the ancient and complex origins of modern humans, in stark contradiction to the simplistic Bronze Age origin myths of the Bible.

The first of these papers, published last November (2025), and available open access in Science Advances, examines human migration into Australia and lends support to the ‘long chronology’ hypothesis for the earliest settlement of Sahul, the Ice Age landmass that united Australia, New Guinea and nearby islands.

The second paper examines the more recent population history of Western Europe. That will be the subject of my next blog post.

According to the long chronology hypothesis, humans first reached Sahul around 60,000 years ago, whereas the short chronology hypothesis places their arrival between about 45,000 and 50,000 years ago. Either date is, of course, utterly incompatible with the childish notion of magical creation just 6,000-10,000 years ago. And unlike geochronological dating methods, which creationists routinely dismiss as fraudulent, flawed or unreliable whenever the results embarrass them, this evidence comes from genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Because mtDNA is inherited through the female line, it can be used to reconstruct maternal ancestry in remarkable detail.

How the molecular clock and mtDNA are used to reconstruct genealogies.

What mtDNA is and why it matters Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is the small genome found in the mitochondria. In humans it is transmitted almost entirely through the maternal line, so both sons and daughters inherit it from their mother, but only daughters pass it on. Because it is largely non-recombining, mtDNA preserves a much clearer record of maternal descent than most nuclear DNA. [1]
Why archaeogeneticists use mtDNA so often mtDNA has long been valuable in studies of human origins and population history because its maternal inheritance and lack of recombination make genealogical relationships easier to trace. It is also especially useful in ancient DNA work because there are many copies of mtDNA per cell, which improves the chances of recovering it from degraded archaeological remains. [2]
How a genealogy is built from mtDNA Researchers sequence mtDNA from ancient and modern samples, compare the mutations they share, and group related sequences into branches known as haplogroups. These are, in effect, branches on the maternal family tree: shared mutations mark a common ancestral line, while additional mutations define smaller sub-branches within it. [3]
What the molecular clock means The molecular clock is the idea that mutations can accumulate through time at a roughly predictable rate. If a stretch of DNA behaves clock-like, the number of differences between two lineages can be used to estimate how long ago they shared a common ancestor. In other words, more accumulated differences usually mean a deeper split in the genealogy. [4]
How the clock is calibrated Genetic differences alone do not give calendar dates. To turn sequence differences into ages, researchers must calibrate the clock using independent evidence, such as dated fossils, archaeological horizons, or geological events. Modern studies often use relaxed clocks, which allow mutation rates to vary somewhat between lineages instead of assuming one perfectly constant rate. [4]
What this reveals about human history Once the tree has been built and calibrated, researchers can estimate the ages of haplogroups, identify which maternal lines are older or younger, and track how those lineages spread across regions. That allows them to reconstruct migrations, population expansions, bottlenecks, and the timing of major dispersal events. [2]
Its main limitation mtDNA is powerful, but it traces only one line of ancestry: your mother, her mother, and so on. It does not represent the whole of a person’s ancestry, so the strongest studies combine mtDNA with Y-chromosome data, autosomal DNA, archaeology, and dating evidence from other sources. [5]

The work of the international team, led by Professor Martin Richards of the University of Huddersfield, is explained in a University of Huddersfield news item:

New genetic research supports “long chronology” for first settlement of Sahul
A major collaboration between the University of Huddersfield’s Archaeogenetics Research Group and the University of Southampton’s Centre for Maritime Archaeology has clarified the first settlement of New Guinea and Australia by modern humans, Homo sapiens.
The work was funded by a European Research Council grant to maritime archaeologist Professor Helen Farr at the University of Southampton, with the archaeogenetics team led by Professor Martin Richards at Huddersfield.

During the last Ice Age, when sea levels were much lower than they are today, New Guinea and Australia were part of a single landmass, known as Sahul. There has been a long-running debate about both the timing of the first settlement of Sahul and the routes by which people first travelled to the ancient super-continent.

The new research, a collaboration between archaeogeneticists, archaeologists, earth scientists and oceanographers, has cast light on the who, where and when of this early maritime migration.

Long versus short chronology debate

It is widely known that the ancestors of New Guineans and Aboriginal Australians have inhabited Sahul for tens of thousands of years, with many Aboriginal Australians understanding that they have always been on country.

Yet, for Western scientists and archaeologists, the details of global dispersals have remained controversial. There are two views on the timing of the settlement – the “long chronology”, suggesting that the first settlement goes back to around 60,000 years and the “short chronology”, which argues for a first landfall around 45,000 to 50,000 years.

The interdisciplinary team, including colleagues at the University of Minho in Portugal, at La Trobe University in Australia, and the University of Oxford, focused firstly on human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genomes to address this question. The mtDNA is inherited only from the mother, and the way the mtDNA sequences vary from one person to the next can therefore be used to recreate the maternal genealogy in great detail.

The team analysed almost 2,500 mtDNA genomes from Aboriginal Australians, New Guineans, and people from the western Pacific and Southeast Asia. They used these to build a genealogical tree and looked at the way the lineages in the tree were distributed from one population to the next. As all DNA changes gradually over time, they used the amount of change in the lineages – known as the “molecular clock” – to date lineages from each region.

Their findings showed that the most ancient lineages seen either in Aboriginal Australians, New Guineans, or both, but nowhere else, dated to around 60,000 years, coming down firmly in support of the long chronology.

The ancestry of the most ancient lineages could be traced back to Southeast Asia. But the team also found that while the majority traced back to more northerly parts of Southeast Asia – northern Indonesia and the Philippines – a significant minority traced to more southerly parts – southern Indonesia, Malaysia and Indochina. This suggested there were at least two distinct dispersal routes into Sahul with lineages from both routes dated to around the same arrival time.

Significance of research findings

The work is especially significant as although the new genetic results fit well with the archaeological and palaeoenvironmental picture, in the last few years many geneticists have been moving in the opposite direction, towards a short chronology

We feel that this is strong support for the long chronology. Still, estimates based on the molecular clock can always be challenged, and the mitochondrial DNA is only one line of descent. We are currently analysing hundreds of whole human genome sequences – 3 billion bases each, compared to 16,000 – to test our results against the many thousands of other lines of descent throughout the human genome. In the future, there will be further archaeological discoveries, and we can also hope that ancient DNA might be recovered from key remains, so we can more directly test these models and distinguish between them.

Professor Martin B. Richards, senior author
School of Applied Sciences
University of Huddersfield
Huddersfield, UK.

This is a great story that helps refine our understanding of human origins, maritime mobility and early seafaring narratives. It reflects the really deep heritage that Indigenous communities have in this region and the skills and technology of these early voyagers.

Professor Helen Farr, co-corresponding author
Centre for Maritime Archaeology
Archaeology
University of Southampton
Southampton, UK.

Publication:
Francesca Gandini et al.
Genomic evidence supports the “long chronology” for the peopling of Sahul.
Sci. Adv. 11, eady9493 (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ady9493

Abstract
The timing of the settlement of Sahul—the Pleistocene landmass formed by present-day New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania that existed until ~9000 years ago (~9 ka)—remains highly contentious. The so-called “long chronology” posits the first main arrivals at ~60 to 65 ka, whereas a “short chronology” proposes 47 to 51 ka. Here, we exhaustively analyze an unprecedentedly large mitogenome dataset (n = 2456) encompassing the full range of diversity from the indigenous populations of Australia, New Guinea, and Oceania, including a lineage related to those of New Guinea in an archaeological sample from Wallacea. We assess these lineages in the context of variation from Southeast Asia and a re-evaluation of the mitogenome mutation rate, alongside genome-wide and Y-chromosome variation, and archaeological and climatological evidence. In contrast to recent recombinational dating approaches, we find support for the long chronology, suggesting settlement by ~60 ka via at least two distinct routes into Sahul.

Fig. 4. Map showing continental shelves of Sunda, Sahul, and the Western Pacific.
Coastal contours at 0, −50, −80, and −120 m below sea level indicate the changing extent of landmass with fluctuating sea levels. Potential migration routes are indicated and the likely marker lineages for mtDNA and Y chromosome are labeled. ESRI, ArcGIS, GEBCO Compilation Group (2020) GEBCO 2020 Grid (doi: 10.5285/a29c5465-b138-234d-e053-6c86abc040b9)

Francesca Gandini et al.
Genomic evidence supports the “long chronology” for the peopling of Sahul.
Sci. Adv. 11, eady9493 (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ady9493

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

So, once again, the facts turn out to be no friend of creationism. Whether the first humans reached Sahul 60,000 years ago or a mere 45,000-50,000 years ago, the conclusion is equally fatal to the childish notion that humans were conjured into existence by magic just a few thousand years ago. And because this evidence comes not from rocks and radiometric dates alone, but from the inherited record carried in human DNA itself, it closes off yet another of the escape routes creationists like to use when the evidence becomes inconvenient.

What studies like this show is that modern humans have a deep, complex and traceable history. We did not appear suddenly, fully formed, in a tiny Bronze Age world centred on the Middle East. We are the product of long migrations, branching lineages, isolated populations and repeated expansions, all of which can now be reconstructed in increasing detail by genetics, archaeology and anthropology working together. The more science uncovers, the richer and more intricate the human story becomes, and the more absurd the biblical caricature looks by comparison.

That, ultimately, is the difference between science and dogma. Science follows the evidence wherever it leads, revises its conclusions when better evidence appears, and steadily builds a more accurate picture of reality. Creationism, by contrast, begins with a fixed conclusion and then twists, denies or ignores whatever contradicts it. The settlement of Sahul is therefore not just another fascinating chapter in human prehistory; it is another demonstration that evidence-based inquiry explains our origins, while mythology merely preserves the misunderstandings of an earlier and far more ignorant age.

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