Nothing except seals, some bats and some birds made it to Australia in millions of years.
Humans conquered Australia a few times just within some ten thousand years.
I think even the people who work on this professionally, have a hard time scaling those timeframes. It seems that mammals evolve rather slowly compared to humans who made huge leaps within possibly just thousands of years.
Moving a population across oceans (deserts, jungles), creating a new line and then blending it again just some thousand years later seems to be an incredibly strong force for evolution.
Australia is a very special case. Until recently, Aboriginal Australians were considered to have the highest levels of Denisovan admixture, but Papuans and Phillipine Negritoes are today considered to have a higher percentage of Denisovan genes.
There has been an ongoing dispute whether Oz was colonized only once because the fact that Australia has never been less than dozens of miles away from other lands inhabited by people means that colonization event(s) was undertaken by ocean-going people(s). However, because it seems to have happened no earlier than ~60kya, and that is not long enough for pygmies to have evolved, and there were Aboriginal pygmies (in Tasmania IIRC. Don't hold me to that, as the recollection is vague and I do not have the reference material in front of me at present), and also other apparent admixture events, such as from Madagascar and/or S. India, estimated to have occurred ~10kya, I am convinced that multiple colonization events contributed to Australia's Aboriginal peopling.
Also strange is that when sea levels recently rose, separating Papua from Oz, despite evidence on local islands of habitation from both sides, there seems to be no admixture of language or genes, suggesting some cultural barrier. However that barrier seems not to have been outright hostility, as there is a lack of evidence of ongoing warfare.
Language studies are quite interesting, as Papua was until recently connected to Oz, and the great diversity of languages across that entire landscape are divided into families that seem to have suddenly diverged, with the newer family appearing to have quite recently swept across Australia, perhaps replacing in genetic lineages more venerable the languages they formerly spoke, which is not common at all.
It is far more common for a lineage to be replaced when the language of a region is than for a group to adopt a new language.
All of this and much more make Australia a very interesting field in every discipline touching on archaeology and human history.
Thanks!
Edit: the subsumation of Sundaland at the end of the Younger Dryas ~13kya seems remarkably to not have produced an influx of people from SE Asia, at least according to archaeogeneticists. This is inexplicable to me, as islands have long been reachable by boat, so long that H. luzonenesis and H. floresiensis both arose on islands their human ancestors could only have reached by boat. Why or how Oz was not repeatedly colonized as successive waves of inundation sank Sundaland beneath the sea is quite mysterious. About the only reason I can think of for that failure to occur is implacable hostility of the then extant Australian population.
...I should have gone with NZ instead :)
what do you think of this?:
I got a feeling that advanced navigation and things were discovered multiple times.
I find this fascinating. A recent paper (Population Genomics of Stone Age Eurasia, May 2022) involving the genetics of the Proto-IndoEuropean expansion of the Yamnaya across Europe and Asia shows a great ferment of people that prefaces the time of the claimed Maori precursors. There certainly was conflict between light and dark skinned peoples at the time in India, as well as across Eurasia, as the pastoral Yamnaya and corded ware culture that came from it used the recently invented dairy technology as an economic springboard launching them into conflicts in all directions.
Another paper (Shinde et al, 2019) on the origin of the Harappan people sheds light on the ferment of the time. Discussion of the paper is almost more informative than the paper, which you can read here. The drying up of the Sarasvati River and subsequent desertification of the region dramatically altered the economic base thereabouts.
I also note the divergence between Polynesian peoples and their heretofore presumed progenitors in Melanesia. There is a very distinct phenotype in Melanesia, Papua, Australia, and the Negritoes of the Phillipines that simply isn't found in Polynesia.
I am only able to have a look at the first few minutes of the video right now, as I am called away to a roof that needs me, but I will - and greatly anticipate - watch the full video. I am aware of archaeological remains that are claimed to have been found of pre-Maori people in NZ, that the researchers are handling with great discretion because of the political hand grenade that evidence is. It will have to suffice presently for me to say there is considerable evidentiary basis for claims that the original people in New Zealand didn't get there from Taiwan, as I have gleaned from the video so far.
Anyway, thanks very much for stirring the fermenting prehistorical evidence bubbling in my potted brain!
If you realize that the Poles are ever moving you can see how the populations that survived had to move.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/maps/historical_declination/ The south pole is getting close to Aussie land now again. It has happened over and over again.
Learn about Catastrophism. It is more than likely the truth.