ArticleNature human behaviour2021
Landscape rules predict optimal superhighways for the first peopling of Sahul.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Stochastic models indicate rapid smallpox spread and mass mortality of Indigenous Australians after colonial exposure.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- roadDB: An R package for exploring early human prehistory and environments with the ROCEEH Out of Africa Database.PloS one · 2026Article
- The earliest evidence of high-elevation ice age occupation in Australia.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Modelling Mobility of Hunter-Gatherer Populations: A Dynamic Simulation Approach Based on Cellular Automata.Journal of archaeological method and theory · 2025Article
- Environmental conditions associated with initial northern expansion of anatomically modern humans.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Physiography, foraging mobility, and the first peopling of Sahul.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- Papua New Guinean Genomes Reveal the Complex Settlement of North Sahul.Molecular biology and evolution · 2021Article
- Stochastic models support rapid peopling of Late Pleistocene Sahul.Nature communications · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Archaeological data and demographic modelling suggest that the peopling of Sahul required substantial populations, occurred rapidly within a few thousand years and encompassed environments ranging from hyper-arid deserts to temperate uplands and tropical rainforests. How this migration occurred and how humans responded to the physical environments they encountered have, however, remained largely speculative. By constructing a high-resolution digital elevation model for Sahul and coupling it with fine-scale viewshed analysis of landscape prominence, least-cost pedestrian travel modelling and high-performance computing, we create over 125 billion potential migratory pathways, whereby the most parsimonious routes traversed emerge. Our analysis revealed several major pathways-superhighways-transecting the continent, that we evaluated using archaeological data. These results suggest that the earliest Australian ancestors adopted a set of fundamental rules shaped by physiological capacity, attraction to visually prominent landscape features and freshwater distribution to maximize survival, even without previous experience of the landscapes they encountered.
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