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Australia has overwhelmingly rejected a plan to give greater rights to Indigenous people in a referendum.All six states voted no to a proposal to change the constitution to recognise Indigenous citizens and create an advisory body to the government. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said defeat was hard: "When you aim high, sometimes you fall short. We understand and respect that we have." Opposition leader Peter Dutton said the result was "good for our country".

Here in Australia, our politicians are promoting a divisive and racist change to our constitution by referendum - the creation of an indigenous "voice" with undefined powers. Voting is underway now.According to Reuters:SYDNEY, Oct 3 (Reuters) - Support for a proposal to amend Australia's constitution to enshrine recognition of Indigenous people has edged higher, according to a poll published on Tuesday, although most voters intend to reject the change in a referendum now underway.Early voting on whether to recognise Indigenous Australians in the constitution and create a "Voice to Parliament" to give them an avenue to advise the government on...

The south east coast of Tamil Nadu was inhabited in pre-historic times mainly by Caucasoids, Mongoloids, Negroids and Australoids rather than people similar to contemporary Tamils, a dental anthropological study has found. A team of anthropologists came to the finding after studying more than 1,000 teeth from Adichanallur's pre-historic harbour site on the south-east coast of Tamil Nadu that dates back to 2,500 BC... Optical microscope techniques were employed to study the teeth, which have shown the various growth stages, ageing and wearing processes, racial and ethnic and geographical affinities, dietary patterns, jaw mechanism, constitutional abnormalities of the jaws, pathological...

Australian COVID camps are open for business, and business had been good. Until the escapes began.Three Aboriginal teens, ages 15, 16, and 17, bolted from the Howard Springs COVID camp around 4:30 a.m. local time on Tuesday. They jumped a fence and headed for the hills.Here is the kicker: All three teens tested negative for COVID the day before they bolted. They never actually HAD the China flu. They were locked up for coming into contact with someone who had it.The three teens are from Katherine, in the Northern Territory, where the current COVID situation is considered “serious.” Katherine is...

Double impact may have caused tsunami, global cooling Pieces of a giant asteroid or comet that broke apart over Earth may have crashed off Australia about 1,500 years ago, says a scientist who has found evidence of the possible impact craters. Satellite measurements of the Gulf of Carpentaria (see map) revealed tiny changes in sea level that are signs of impact craters on the seabed below, according to new research by marine geophysicist Dallas Abbott. Based on the satellite data, one crater should be about 11 miles (18 kilometers) wide, while the other should be 7.4 miles (12 kilometers) wide....

Aboriginal people had a deep knowledge of the land, said historian Bill Gammage, an emeritus professor at Australian National University who studies Australian and Aboriginal history. They can feel the grass and know if it would burn well; they knew what types of fires to burn for what types of land, how long to burn, and how frequently. Aboriginal techniques are based in part on fire prevention: ridding the land of fuel, like debris, scrub, undergrowth and certain grasses. The fuel alights easily, which allows for more intense flames that are harder to fight. The Aboriginal people would set small-scale...

For thousands of years, the Indigenous people of Australia set fire to the land. Long before Australia was invaded and colonised by Europeans, fire management techniques - known as "cultural burns" - were being practised. The cool-burning, knee-high blazes were designed to happen continuously and across the landscape. The fires burn up fuel like kindling and leaf detritus, meaning a natural bushfire has less to devour. Since Australia's fire crisis began last year, calls for better reintegration of this technique have grown louder. But it should have happened sooner, argues one Aboriginal knowledge expert. "The bush needs to burn," says...

Popular U.S. comedian and host of the top rating 'The Daily Show' Trevor Noah has come under fire for a comedy routine where he called Aboriginal women unattractive. Footage of his stand-up show, from 2013, emerged ahead of his Australian tour, which starts in Melbourne next month. 'All women of every race can be beautiful,' Noah tells an audience in the footage which emerged online overnight. 'And I know some of you are sitting there now going, 'Oh Trevor, yeah, but I've never seen a beautiful Aborigine', he jokes.

The first modern Britons, who lived about 10,000 years ago, had “dark to black” skin, a groundbreaking DNA analysis of Britain’s oldest complete skeleton has revealed. The fossil, known as Cheddar Man, was unearthed more than a century ago in Gough’s Cave in Somerset. Intense speculation has built up around Cheddar Man’s origins and appearance because he lived shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental Europe to Britain at the end of the last ice age. People of white British ancestry alive today are descendants of this population. It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia’s world-famous Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock, will be closed to climbers from 2019, its management board said on Wednesday, ending a decades-long campaign by Aborigines to protect their sacred monolith in the Northern Territory. A board of eight traditional owners and four government officials voted unanimously to close the rock to climbers, a spokesperson told Reuters. [snip]

Irish colonists were among those who mistreated Australia’s indigenous people, the first Aboriginal woman to be elected to Australia’s House of Representatives has said. Linda Burney, MP, said that it must be acknowledged that the Irish had a historical role in committing atrocities against the Aboriginal people. Burney’s comments come days after Irish president Michael D. Higgins recognized during a speech in Western Australia the role of the Irish in injustices against the Aboriginal people. […] The Labor Party MP also spoke about “the warm relationship” between the Irish and Aboriginal people today, and mentioned the number of Aboriginal people...

A Facebook Live video of the protest shows a pickup truck revving its engine in front of the crowd that had spilled onto the street in Reno's downtown. Several protesters confronted the driver and the passenger before the truck drives through the crowd, tires squealing, at about 6:40 p.m. Monday. Soto said the activists did not have a permit to protest in the street, but some had gathered in the travel lanes of Virginia Street on the main casino drag. Soto said he couldn't comment on whether the driver or passenger felt threatened by the crowd and declined to comment...

Tuesday, 18 February, 2003, 16:57 GMT Date for first Australians The Mungo burials have cast doubt on "Out of Africa" A new analysis of Australia's oldest human remains suggests humans arrived on the continent about 50,000 years ago. The evidence is based on a re-examination of the so-called Mungo Man skeleton, unearthed in New South Wales (NSW) in 1974. Scientists say the individual was probably buried about 40,000 years ago, when humans had been living in the area for some 10,000 years. We find no evidence to support claims for human occupation or burials near 60 kyr ago James Bowler...

On a rugged island just offshore from Ventura County, archaeologists have turned up evidence of some of the oldest human activity in coastal Southern California. On Santa Cruz Island, the largest of the Channel Islands, researchers have found three sites scattered with ancient tool-making debris and the shells of harvested shellfish. The youngest of the three sites has been dated to 6,600 BCE, but based on the types of tools found at the other two, archaeologists say they may be as much as 11,000 to 12,000 years old. The artifacts are traces of what's known as the Island Paleocoastal culture,...

It draws on fossil evidence showing Homo sapiens was present in East Africa around 195,000 years ago and that our species had dispersed to the far corners of Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas by 12,000 years ago. This increase in global human populations is linked with a variety of species extinctions, one of the most significant being the reduction by around two-thirds of 150 species of 'megafauna' or big beasts between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, says the paper, with their disappearance having 'dramatic effects' on the structure of the ecosystem and seed dispersal. ...second... the advent of agriculture worldwide,...

A new study of the 37,000-year old remains of the "Deep Skull" - the oldest modern human discovered in island South-East Asia - has revealed this ancient person was not related to Indigenous Australians, as had been originally thought. The Deep Skull was also likely to have been an older woman, rather than a teenage boy. The research, led by UNSW Australia Associate Professor Darren Curnoe, represents the most detailed investigation of the ancient cranium specimen since it was found in Niah Cave in Sarawak in 1958. "Our analysis overturns long-held views about the early history of this region," says...

The arrival of the first people in Australia about 50,000 years ago did not result in significantly greater fire activity, according to a landmark new research report on the continent's fire history going back 70,000 years. Despite a widely held belief that the frequent use of fire by Aboriginal people resulted in vegetation change and other environmental impacts in prehistoric times, the most comprehensive study of Australian charcoal records has found they had no major impact on fire regimes... On large time scales, overall fire activity in Australia predominantly reflects prevailing climate, with less activity in colder glacial periods and...

SYDNEY (AFP) – An Australian study has uncovered signs that the country's ancient Aborigines may have been the world's first stargazers, pre-dating Stonehenge and Egypt's pyramids by thousands of years. Professor Ray Norris said widespread and detailed knowledge of the stars had been passed down through the generations by Aborigines, whose history dates back tens of millennia, in traditional songs and stories. "We know there's lots of stories about the sky: songs, legends, myths," said Norris, an astronomer for Australia's science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO). "We wondered how much further does it go than that. It...

Scientists say an Aboriginal rock art depiction of an extinct giant bird could be Australia's oldest painting. The red ochre painting, which depicts two emu-like birds with their necks outstretched, could date back to the earliest days of settlement on the continent. It was rediscovered at the centre of the Arnhem Land plateau about two years ago, but archaeologists first visited the site a fortnight ago. A palaeontologist has confirmed the animals depicted are the megafauna species Genyornis. Archaeologist Ben Gunn said the giant birds became extinct more than 40,000 years ago. "The details on this painting indicate that it...

Debate has raged about the demise of “whopper hopper” P. goliah A fossil study of the extinct giant kangaroo has added weight to the theory that humans were responsible for the demise of “megafauna” 46,000 years ago. The decline of plants through widespread fire or changes toward an arid climate have also played into the debate about the animals’ demise. But an analysis of kangaroo fossils suggested they ate saltbush, which would have thrived in those conditions. The research is in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. There has long been dissent in the palaeontology community about the cause...