The humans that roamed Australia 50,000 years ago

[music] Tens of thousands of years ago, humans set out on a voyage of exploration. Probably the first voyage of exploration in human history. The journey to Australia. We know it had to have been a voyage because Australia has been cut off from every other continent for the past 30 million years when it separated from Antarctica.

I believe Antarctica must have been somewhere else, too, because I can't imagine kangaroos evolving in the snow. But this is why the wildlife is just so different out there. [music] The prehistoric voyages had to cross what we call the Wallace line, the line which separates the animals of Oceanania from [music] Asia. It's the kangaroo tiger divide.

Kangaroos one side, tigers the other. Now, this area is split up into thousands of different islands. [music] But 50,000 years ago, New Guinea, Australia, and many, many of the other islands were connected in this land mass we call Sahul. And this is exactly the time when the ancestors of modern Aboriginals and Papwins reached their new homeland.

There's sort of two routes that were possibly taken. We had a northern route through Sului into New Guinea or a southern route through Java, Flores, and and Teimour. Whichever route was taken, these explorers had to battle really strong currents that were constantly trying to sweep them away back towards Antarctica. Incredibly, at a site on Timour West, east Timour, archaeologists may have unearthed uh one of these island hopping communities on the sunbathed hills swarming the warm Llaya River.

Archaeologists excavated a rock shelter called Ly Cave, which contained deep, deep sediments, the perfect environment for preserving traces of prehistoric [music] life. People seem to have suddenly started living here around 44,000 years ago. There isn't any evidence of human activity before those layers. [music] In amongst the stone tools and the and the teeny tiny remains of ancient berries, there is lots of evidence of these people being capable seafarers.

>> [music] >> The archaeological layers contain lots of remains of fish and not just river fish but marine animals like grouper and travali. I mean other than the fact that they're on a tiny island, it's certain evidence that these people were were comfortable seafarers. These islands are not being reached by accident. I don't even think it's it's possible to accidentally [music] colonize all of Australia.

The ocean currents ...