Who were the first Australians?

Following the announcement of Darwin’s theory of evolution, researchers tried to understand ancient humans by examining supposedly ‘primitive’ features in the biology and culture of indigenous peoples around the world. Thomas Huxley (1864) and others began looking at crania of recent Aborigines, thinking they preserved characteristics that would also be found in the ancestors of Europeans. When the first fossil human was found in Australia, the encrusted skull from Talgai on the Darling Downs (Figure 5.1), anatomists Grafton Elliot Smith and Arthur Keith used it to argue that early Australians resembled the fossils of Europe, most infamously the Piltdown skull. Since that time more ancient human remains have been unearthed, but questions about the biological ancestry of Australian Aboriginal people proved difficult to answer.