The Seven Summits are the highest peaks on each of the traditional seven continents. However, there are alternative lists that include more than just seven mountains. This quiz requires you to rank these ten peaks in order of height.
A group of researchers have identified several new species of sunbirds, whose range spans from Africa in the west and Australia in the east, in the tropical Wakatobi Islands in central Indonesia. The paper, published Oct. 25 by scientists from Ireland and Indonesia, has described the physical and genetic distinctness of the Wakatobi sunbird (Cinnyris […]
Abstract
The peopling of Sahul (the combined continent of Australia and New Guinea) represents the earliest continental migration and settlement event of solely anatomically modern humans, but its patterns and ecological drivers remain largely conceptual in the current literature. We present an advanced stochastic-ecological model to test the relative support for scenarios describing where and when the first humans entered Sahul, and their most probable routes of early settlement. The model supports a dominant entry via the northwest Sahul Shelf first, potentially followed by a second entry through New Guinea, with initial entry most consistent with 50,000 or 75,000 years ago based on comparison with bias-corrected archaeological map layers. The model’s emergent properties predict that peopling of the entire continent occurred rapidly across all ecological environments within 156–208 human generations (4368–5599 years) and at a plausible rate of 0.71–0.92 km year . More broa
Date Time
First Australians grew to a population of millions, much more than previous estimates
More than 3 million people may have lived in the area that is now modern-day Australia, far more than any previous estimate
We know it is more than 60,000 years since the first people entered the continent of Sahul – the giant landmass that connected New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania when sea levels were lower than today.
But where the earliest people moved across the landscape, how fast they moved, and how many were involved, have been shrouded in mystery.
Our latest research, published today shows the establishment of populations in every part of this giant continent could have occurred in as little as 5,000 years. And the entire population of Sahul could have been as high as 6.4 million people.