Arrival· Where Sapiens lives

Sahul, Australia and New Guinea

65 ka

The first sea crossing in the history of the species, and the first continent reached by boat. Sahul is Australia and New Guinea joined into one landmass by the low seas of the ice ages.

What the evidence shows

At Madjedbebe the artefacts lie in three dense bands, and the excavators tested whether they had sunk: pieces struck from the same core were refitted, and the sediments were dated grain by grain. What the lowest band contains is not a crude toolkit. There are grinding stones, ground ochres, reflective additives and ground-edge hatchet heads. The published figure, 65,000 years, is a minimum and not an estimate: the excavators present it as a new minimum age for the arrival of people in Australia, which dates the deepest artefacts they reached and says nothing about what may lie below them.

Dating & uncertainty

Reaching Sahul required open-water crossings, which is not in dispute. The 65,000-year age is: critics argue that termites and other disturbance moved artefacts downward, and read the occupation as later, around 50,000 years. Gandini et al. (2025) weigh 2,456 mitogenomes in favour of the "long chronology" (~60-65 ka); O'Connell et al. (2018) hold that any age beyond 50 ka is unlikely to be valid. The timeline draws the long chronology and says so.

Sources

1. Clarkson et al. (2017), Nature · Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago
2. Williams et al. (2020), Geoarchaeology · Identifying disturbance in archaeological sites in tropical northern Australia: implications for previously proposed 65,000-year continental occupation date
3. Clarkson et al. (2018), Australian Archaeology · Reply to comments on Clarkson et al. (2017) 'Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago'
4. Bradshaw, C. J. A. et al. (2021), Nature Communications · Stochastic models support rapid peopling of Late Pleistocene Sahul
5. Gandini, F. et al. (2025), Science Advances · Genomic evidence supports the “long chronology” for the peopling of Sahul
6. O'Connell, J. F. et al. (2018), PNAS · When did Homo sapiens first reach Southeast Asia and Sahul?