Haplogroup C & K

Aboriginal Australians

With the Andamanese, the oldest continuous population surviving from the out-of-Africa migration.

Australia

History & information

The Aboriginal peoples of Australia have occupied the continent for at least 50,000 to 65,000 years, arriving during the same southern coastal dispersal that carried Black Aboriginal populations into South Asia and Melanesia.

They are, together with the Andamanese of India, the oldest continuous population from the out-of-Africa migration surviving today. Hundreds of distinct language groups, songlines and kinship systems record that depth of time in oral form.

Paternally, Aboriginal Australians carry haplogroup C — principally C1b2b (C-M347) — alongside K and its descendant lineages, including S and M. Haplogroup C is the lineage shared with the Melanesians and with the earliest Black populations of the Americas.

The continuity of Aboriginal Australia is what makes it central to this atlas: a population that never lost the phenotype of the first people, and whose paternal lineages branch directly off the earliest departures from the continent.

The other side

The lineage breakdown

Two lineages define the Aboriginal Australian peoples: haplogroup C and haplogroup K, the paternal markers of the earliest coastal dispersal out of Africa into Asia and Oceania.

C-M130. One of the first lineages to leave Africa along the southern coastal route. In Australia it survives principally as C1b2b (C-M347), a lineage found almost nowhere else on earth, and shared at its root with the Melanesians and the earliest Black populations of the Americas.

Open lineage

K-M9 and its Australian descendants, above all S (K2b1a) and M (K2b1b), together with K2* lineages that account for much of the remaining paternal ancestry of Aboriginal Australian populations alongside haplogroup C.

Open lineage

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