Following on from Timaraa's question?

Question

How did aboriginals get to Australia? If they arrived via Asia, why are they black and not brown like Asians?

Laurie

So they somehow went from being black in Africe to brown in Asia and back to black in Australia. Doesn't seem right.

Answer 1

Australia was populated by a dispersal of humans who left Northeast Africa, probably around 50,000-100,000 years ago. This is most strongly suggested by studies of variation among recent human DNA. There is not a lot of archaeological evidence for this dispersal because a lot of the coastline of south Asia has been flooded by sea level rise over the last 20,000 years. There are, however, archaeological sites in New Guinea and New Ireland in excess of 40,000 years that suggest that by that time humans had effective watercraft capable of voyages in the tens of kilometers. (New Guinea and New Ireland are to the East of "Wallace's Line" a biogeographic frontier consisting of a deep trench that has not separated the islands east of it from mainland Eurasia for tens of millions of years. The oldest evidence for a human presence in Australia dates to around 35,000-40,000 years ago. Just to be clear, though, this dispersal was probably not a case of planned expeditions like the European colonization, but rather small movements of hunter-gatherer-fisher communities played out over prolonged time periods. Need a quick overview? Josephine Flood's Archaeology of the Dreamtime is a good read. For more authoritative overviews see Johan Kamminga and John Mulvaney's Prehistory of Australia.
Aborigines in Australia had relativley simple watercraft at the time Europeans encountered them, but it is always possible that more complex ocean-faring technologies were abandoned in favor of a focus on more terrestrial resources in recent time periods.

Answer 2

IIRC, it's usually thought that Australian aboriginals got to Australia by rafting over from Asia. The reason why they are black and not brown has to do with the environment and climate they've experienced in Australia. The assumption (and it seems reasonable to me) is that living in Australia, having dark skin confers greater evolutionary benefits than lighter skin.

If you're now wondering why white Australians aren't becoming black, the suggestions I have for you are
1. They simply haven't been there long enough
2. We now have technology that can help us to change the environment.

As an anecdotal piece of evidence about why darker skin (higher levels of protective melanin pigment) is advantageous, consider the prevalence of skin cancer in white Australians.

Answer 3

Why wouldn't it seem right?
You see what is happening to white Autralians with skin cancer.
If a society without access to a cure had similar problems, evolution would have had time enough to sort them out.
And they were probably not light skinned to start with. In India, for example, you find lots of very dark skinned people, remnants of the original population, before the light skinned Indo-European-language group moved in.

Answer 4

depends what heat setting god had on the oven