The headlines this week are triumphant: a massive new genetic study in Science Advances "finally proves" that modern humans reached Sahul (ancient Australia–New Guinea) around 60,000 years ago, pushing the arrival date back by almost 15,000 years.
But buried in the fine print of the same article is a detail that quietly detonates one of the most politically sacred claims repeated in Australian classrooms, museums, and land-rights hearings: the assertion that Aboriginal people were "the first Australians," full stop.
They weren't.
The study's co-author, Martin Richards, is explicit: the first modern humans who reached Sahul around 60kya and, on their way through Wallacea, "likely interbred with archaic humans such as Homo longi, H. luzonensis and even 'the hobbit' Homo floresiensis."
Let that sink in.
Homo floresiensis (the famous "hobbit") was still living on the island of Flores until at least 50,000 years ago, possibly later. Archaeological evidence puts modern human arrival on Flores no earlier than ~46,000 years ago. That means when the first canoes from Sulawesi or the Philippines approached the shores of what is now Indonesia, there were already populations of small-statured, small-brained, tool-making hominins waving back at them (or throwing spears).
The same goes for Homo luzonensis in the Philippines and the mysterious "Dragon Man" (Homo longi) lineage in mainland Asia. These were not modern humans. They were archaic, non-sapiens hominins who had been in Southeast Asia and Wallacea for hundreds of thousands of years before sapiens ever showed up.
So when the ancestors of today's Aboriginal Australians and Papuans paddled across the Wallace Line ~60kya, they were not stepping onto a pristine, empty continent. They were entering a landscape that already had resident hominin populations. The geneticists openly admit interbreeding occurred. That means the very first generations of "Australians" already carried a measurable percentage of DNA from people who had been there long before them.
Logically, biologically, and archaeologically, the archaic hominins were the hobbits, the Luzon folk, perhaps even late-surviving erectus-grade populations in Java were the first humans (in the broad sense) to live on the landmasses that would later become Sahul.
This does mean we have to retire the simplistic slogan "First Australians" when we're speaking with scientific precision.
The real story is even more interesting than the myth:
Multiple waves and species of humans converged on the same supercontinent.
The sapiens newcomers absorbed some archaic ancestry (just as Europeans absorbed Neanderthal and East Asians absorbed Denisovan).
Over the next ten millennia, the sapiens lineage, with its superior technology and numbers, completely replaced the archaic populations (exactly the same pattern we see everywhere else on Earth). This may have been by interbreeding, and or warfare against males.
What survived was not the very much archaic DNA, but an overwhelmingly modern-human genetic legacy that has remained in place ever since.
In other words, Aboriginal Australians are not "the first" in the sense of being the original hominin inhabitants. They are, however, the victorious lineage the ones whose descendants are still here telling the story 60,000 years later.
Science is not the enemy of Indigenous dignity; it is the enemy of comforting oversimplifications. The truth is that Australia, like every other continent except Africa itself, was settled by modern humans who displaced or absorbed earlier hominin residents. Pretending otherwise isn't respect; it's condescension wrapped in sentimentality.
Aborigines weren't the first humans here. They were the last ones standing.