ALONG with everyone else it seems, the forefathers of Australia's Aborigines are from East Africa.

A study of DNA by a team of international researchers puts the boot into the theory that Aborigines are the result of interbreeding between modern man and archaic humans like the so-called Homo erectus.

Those who support this theory say that the tools and skeletal remains of Aborigines are different and cannot come from the small group of people who left Africa around 70,000 years ago and made their way through Europe and Asia.

The results of the study are in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and suggest Australia's indigenous people arrived from Papua New Guinea around 50,000 years ago. The minor differences evident in the fossil record are explained by spending so long on the continent on their own.

So long in isolation in fact, they developed unique characteristics.

At the time of their migration, Australia and Papua New Guinea were part of a land mass that stretched through Asia.

The land bridge they traversed to get to Australia was submerged by rising sea levels around 8,000 years ago.

Sheila van Holst Pellekaan of the University of New South Wales, whose research into Aboriginal DNA was included in the study, welcomed further cement for the out-of-Africa theory. She said modern humans had been on the Australian continent for around 50,000 years. DPA

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