The number is a Western framing
Worth saying first. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people generally hold that they have been here since the beginning, and some organisations give an Acknowledgement with no number in it at all for that reason. What follows is the archaeological and genetic evidence — one way of answering a question, not the only one.
40,000 years is the wrong number for this claim
It is roughly the age of the oldest human remains found in Australia. Mungo Man and Mungo Lady, from the Willandra Lakes in New South Wales, were re-dated in 2003 to about 40,000 to 42,000 years, with occupation of the lakes region going back to around 50,000. Mungo Lady is the oldest known cremation anywhere in the world.
That is a floor for skeletons, not for people. Bones survive rarely; stone tools and hearths survive far more often, and they are older.
50,000 years is the figure nobody can argue you out of
Known in the field as the short chronology. It rests on a broad base: dozens of archaeological sites across the continent, and — until recently — the genetics. A 2017 study of Aboriginal mitochondrial genomes was titled, plainly, “Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in Australia”. A 2018 review in PNAS by O’Connell, Allen and colleagues argued that molecular clock studies of mitochondrial, Y-chromosome and nuclear DNA all converge on settlement around or slightly after 50,000 years.
65,000 years rests substantially on one site
Madjedbebe, in Arnhem Land. A 2017 paper in Nature by Clarkson and colleagues dated the sediments around the lowest artefacts by optically stimulated luminescence and reported 65,000 ± 6,000 years, along with ground-edge hatchet heads and grinding stones — the oldest of their kind found anywhere.
It is serious work in a leading journal, and it is genuinely contested. The objection is that artefacts may have worked their way down through sandy deposits, so that the tools are younger than the sand dated around them; termite disturbance has been proposed as the mechanism. The authors replied pointing to artefacts that refit each other, intact hearths, and no evidence of extensive disturbance.
That argument is not settled. Anyone who tells you 65,000 is simply established, or simply wrong, is ahead of the evidence.
What changed in November 2025
This is the part that matters, because genetics was the main support for the shorter timeline.
A study published in Science Advances on 28 November 2025 — “Genomic evidence supports the ‘long chronology’ for the peopling of Sahul” — analysed 2,456 mitochondrial genomes, the largest such dataset assembled for this question, covering Aboriginal Australian, New Guinean and Oceanian populations. Before dating them the authors corrected the molecular clock: mitochondrial DNA does not mutate at a steady rate over time, so they built a correction curve calibrated on remote Pacific populations.
Their result was settlement of Sahul by about 60,000 years ago, by at least two separate routes.
So the gap between the two lines of evidence has narrowed from archaeology 65, genetics 50 to archaeology 65, genetics 60. Researchers remain divided, and the authors themselves note that uncertainties about mutation rates and population bottlenecks remain.
So why this site says more than 60,000
- It is the floor of the longer chronology, not its ceiling — so it holds even if the Madjedbebe dating is one day revised down.
- It is now supported by both independent lines of evidence. “65,000” is supported by one.
- It is the figure AIATSIS itself uses: upwards of 60,000 years is what current research reveals.
- Our sentence is about Country sustaining life, not about dating a migration — which is the more useful thing to say and the more defensible one.
Where to check this yourself
- Clarkson et al. (2017), Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago, Nature 547:306–310
- O’Connell, Allen et al. (2018), When did Homo sapiens first reach Southeast Asia and Sahul?, PNAS
- Tobler et al. (2017), Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in Australia, Nature 544:180–184
- Gandini et al. (2025), Genomic evidence supports the “long chronology” for the peopling of Sahul, Science Advances 11(48)
- National Museum of Australia — Mungo Lady
- AIATSIS — First Peoples of Australia
How this page was put together, and its limits
It was assembled from published abstracts, journal listings and reporting — not from reading the full papers. The machine it was written on could search but could not open the journals. The dates, figures and titles above should be checked against the originals before anyone relies on them in print. If any of it is wrong, the fault is here and not in the sources.
It is also a snapshot. This is an active field: the position moved in November 2025 and may move again. If you are reading this a long way from that date, check whether it still holds.