ABSTRACT
The vast island continent of Australia was thinly peopled by a few hundred-thousand dark-skinned hunters and gatherers when British settlement began in 1788. James Cook, who had sailed up the east coast eighteen years earlier, wrote that they might ‘appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans’. The ancestors of the Aborigines, as they are now known, probably entered Australia more than 40,000 years ago, but no one knows from where they came or to whom they are biologically or linguistically related.
