//What was the date before 1988?//

The closest Monday to the 26th, thereby ensuring a long weekend every year like we enjoyed this year. It seems like the best arrangement to me... cut Australia day loose from its historical baggage, and just give people a long weekend to celebrate being Aussie in the manner they find most appropriate

Steele,

"There is no way in the world though that the claim “that a great many of the Aboriginal Australian's ancestors came from India” can be derived from this study nor any other"

In 4,000 years a fair estimate would be 133 generations of people, at, say, 30 years per generation, now as the number of ancestral positions (not necessarily separate ancestors) behind each individual is 1,048,576 in a mere 20 generations, then it is fair to say that a great many of the ancestors came from India.

//My own guess is that a great many of the Aboriginal Australian's ancestors came from India.//

Well, yeah. Although not directly, of course, they'd have come via Indonesia. All of this is well supported by the RSOH.

//Which proves nothing, of course, but Dingoes look a lot like the native dog of India (Indian pariah dog), and the Dingoes had to come from somewhere.//

Yeah, they came from up north as well. It is generally believed they came a lot later than the first human settlers, and it is little surprise that they closely resemble not only Indian pariah breeds but also pariah breeds from other parts of the world. I reckon that if you were to take a large selection of mongrel breeds to ensure a good diversity of canid genes and let them run feral for 5,000 years in an environment not dissimilar to prehistoric India/Australia/Africa/South America/Asia, you'd end up with a pariah breed remarkably similar to our dingo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo

Dear ALTRAV,

You wrote;

“Steeley, c'mon get grip man.
I know you don't want to believe it but these are facts and figures derived from experts that have been studying and researching this topic for a lot longer than you or I.
So it also blows the 50,000 to 60,000 year myth out of the water.
More like between four and ten.”

I really don't know where to start. You are now being orders of magnitude more ignorant that your average setting of ineptitude my friend.

Unlike the summary article Philip S linked to which is for plebs like you to misunderstand and twist to your prevailing ideology I went to the study itself. Here it is;

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/5/1803#ref-5

Here is what it really says;

“In conclusion, our results suggest an ancient association between Australia, New Guinea, and the Mamanwa (a Negrito group from the Philippines), with a time of divergence of at least 35,000 y ago, implying a common origin but an early separation for these groups, and supporting the view that these populations represent the descendants of an early “southern migration route”. Strikingly, we also detect a signal of substantial gene flow between Indian and Australia populations before European contact. We estimate the date of this admixture to be 141 generations ago and suggest that this gene flow may be associated with the changes documented in the Australian archaeological record at about this time.”

Cont..

Cont..

As it turned out this study did not do its own sampling of the Aboriginal DNA but instead appeared to rely on that from a different study titled 'Peopling of Sahul: mtDNA Variation in Aboriginal Australian and Papua New Guinean Populations'
so I went to it as well;

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707623349

It says “Paleovegetation change in Australia provides evidence that human immigrants arrived ∼60,000–65,000 years ago (Johnson et al. 1999; Miller et al. 1999). Furthermore, a human skeleton from Lake Mungo recently was dated, yielding an age of 62,000 years ± 6,000 years (Thorne et al. 1999).”

It also reflects; “Polymorphisms in the α-globin system have shown distinctive variation in PNG highland populations compared with northern Aboriginal Australian populations (Yenchitosomanus et al. 1985, 1986; Tsintsof et al. 1990), whereas central Australians shared similar haplotypes with PNG highland populations”

Which precisely makes my earlier point, the mixing of some Indian DNA in Northwest Australia is understandable if not expected but that it is not an unequivocal conclusion for the wider Aboriginal population.

None of these studies even hint at “blows the 50,000 to 60,000 year myth out of the water.”

And only the pig-ignorant would ever think they did.

Dear Is Mise,

There is little doubt that there should be DNA trails left in India by the various waves of movement of homo sapians to the region.

But you don't get to make the kind of broad statement, which has obviously confused our poor ALTRAV again, without getting pulled up.

Anyway why even bring it up? What do you think it proves?