Well, I come here because we have that press release tomorrow, of the first Aboriginal Australian genome, and so we have we have a paper and press in science saying something about what this genome cells about early modern human dispersal. It actually changes our view on on the early dispersal of modern man, in the sense that that previously the general notion was that there was one expansion, you know eastwards, so to speak, that conquered the world. And from that expansion, you know, different groups popped out. First Europeans, later Asians, and from within the Asian cluster, then Aboriginal Australians kind of moved down to Australia. And now we can show that it's probably not what happened. There was in fact at least two early expansions eastwards. So the first one is, this you know, the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians already expanding into the world some 70,000 years ago. At that time our ancestors, I mean European and Asian ancestors were sitting somewhere in Africa and the Middle East, not really daring entering the world. But these guys was just crossing all the way to Australia and then some 30,000 years later our ancestors start moving. Some move into Europe, some move into Asia, and the Asians then meet, you can say, the remnants of the first expansion. In probably some places in Asia and they intermixed with those guys and that's the reason why genetically speaking, Aboriginal Australians and Asians are more similar today than Aborigine Australians and Europeans for example. So, we have used a hair sample that was collected by an British anthropologist in the early 1920s and we used this sample, it's from South Western Australia, and the whole idea of using the sample was to try to increase the chances of getting an unadmixed, I mean recently, you can say, a genome without recent European admixture. And also, you can say, to explore the possibility whether you can actually obtain genome sequences from such museum collections. I mean from you can say historical ancient material, because that would open an avenue for exploring the genetics and the history of populations that have either been heavily admixed recently or have gone extinct, where you have hair from. And this is also what we find, there's no evidence of recent European admixture in in the genome, and we use hair, because here is not porous or anything like that, so all contamination from all the people who have handled this here over the years is all sitting on the surface, so by bleaching it you can actually remove all the contamination, so you have the only the endogenous DNA. Bone and teeth are porous and it means the contamination both in the form of microbes, but also people who have handled the specimens, actually penetrating very deep into bones and teeth. While with hair, it's actually a kind of like a plastic surface, I mean it's all lying on the outside, so it's very easy to remove. So, even though hair, you can say per gram of material, contains much less DNA than bone and teeth normally, you can get a much cleaner result. Essentially what we're doing is trying to isolate all the DNA away from all the other components and from biological material. Now, all biological material contains DNA to some extent and as archeogeneticists DNA specialists we isolate the DNA away from all the cellular components, things like fats and proteins that are that are inside the hair shaft. We isolate that DNA away, we smash it up into lots of little pieces and then we shotgun sequence it, which means we randomly sequence every single piece of these small fragments. And then the billion piece jigsaw comes into play, where we try and piece it all together to make a comprehensive picture. So, that's what the new technology that we're putting forward here is about essentially, as using new sequencing technology to look at old samples. As people sort of move or have moved across the globe and even live in on and signal places and populations intermingle and their DNA changes over time, and they leave behind sort of genetic breadcrumbs, if you like, and what we do when we get the genetic code is were able to actually look at these pieces of DNA, how they've changed, similarities and differences and look at intermingling. So, we can go from the genetic code through to some inference about what populations were doing over time and how they moved. We've had a long time known that Aboriginal people been in Australia for 40,000 - now we know - 50,000 years. So, archaeological evidence has told us that. What this tells us is that it's been even longer and we've had great difficulty in extending back that time frame. Some inkling that maybe there was some, there's two sites possibly dated to 60,000, but they remain controversial and we haven't been able to duplicate them. So, this is now giving us indication that people have been here, or at least separated from other groups for 70,000 years perhaps. And so now we have a time frame that's much older. Australia has always been isolated, as we all know, and we've got unique fauna and it's also got this incredibly difficult sea crossing between it and Asia. So, people must have had incredible amount of foresight, planning, communications and ability to conceptualize things. That is there were modern people though, just like us. So we know from archaeological evidence, that whoever got here, it's one of the earliest achievements of modern humans, if you like, to get to Australia. But now we've pushed that achievement back from 50,000 to 70,000. In the South West of WA we've been working on, my dad Charlie Dortch started this work in the 1970s at Devil's Lair, which has got one of the longest sequences of cave occupation or occupation of any site in Australia, so that that began at about 47 to 49 thousand years ago. I was part of a team in the 1990s where we re-dated the sediments using luminescence techniques, a new method of dating. That site is pretty well dated and it'd be a fantastic resource for looking at, it continues to be a fantastic resource, for looking at human occupation. Well I think if we can recover human DNA from there and working with the traditional owners in the area as we have is this current project we will hopefully be able to recover enough human DNA to look at how people have arrived and you know where they came from and so on in that area. And that aside there is also of course plant and animal DNA in those sediments which would be incredibly interesting. We began that research because, you know, the Aboriginal people of the region that this sample came from obviously have cultural concerns. The hair sample has cultural values, well aside from a scientific value, and so they were concerned firstly, about how the sample was collected and then you know they had current contemporary concerns about the research that was being done on the hair sample. So, I did some research into how the sample is collected first of all and found that it was taken by the Cambridge anthropologist Alfred Hadden, who caught the Trans-Australia Line across the country in 1923 and stopped at a small centre called Golden Ridge, just outside of Kalgoorlie, where he really would have only had the opportunity to collect the sample in a voluntary exchange. Aboriginal people were at that time trading artifacts and so on for food and money along the Trans Line and obviously this was a little bit more unusual transaction, but someone gave up a hair sample and received whatever in return from Hadden, and that's how the sample found its way to Cambridge University. When the the Goldfields Land and Sea Council, which represents the Aboriginal people of the region, when they learned about this research they had some concerns about it, so you know, I did that research into the origins of the sample and then Professor Willerslev came to Western Australia in June 2011 to discuss his research with the board, which, you know was greatly appreciated, the respect that was shown and so on, and the board, which as I say, represents the people of the region gave their unqualified endorsement. There's a lot of interest in the results, although not everyone accepts that the scientific discourse is the only explanation for people's origins in the desert and elsewhere. But there was no qualifications on having the research done.
