What is the first thing that you can do to get a new perspective? Well, I come here because we have a press release tomorrow of the first of a regional Australian genome. And so we have a paper and press in science saying something about what this genome tells about early modern human dispersal. It actually changes our view on the early dispersal of modern man in the sense that previously the general notion was that there was one expansion, you know, Eastwards, so to speak, that conquered the world. And from that expansion, you know, different groups popped out, first Europeans, later Asians, and from within the Asian cluster, then other regional Australians kind of moved down to Australia. And now we can show that it's probably not what happened. There was, in fact, at least two early expansions Eastwards. So the first one is, you know, the ancestors of our original Australians already expanding into the world some 70,000 years ago. And at that time, our ancestors, I mean European and Asian ancestors were sitting somewhere in Africa in the Middle East, not really daring, entering the world. But these guys was just crossing all the way to Australia. And then some 30,000 years later, our ancestors start moving, some moves into Europe, some moves into Asia. And the Asians then meet, you can say, the remnants of the first expansion, probably some places in Asia, and they intermixed with those guys. And that's the reason why genetic is speaking of regional Australians and Asians are more similar today than of regional Australians in Europeans, for example. So we have used a hair sample that was collected by British anthropologists in early 1920s. And we used this sample, it's from Southwestern Australia. And the whole idea of using this sample was to try to increase the chances of getting an unandmixed, I mean, recently, you can say a genome without recent European mixture. And also, you can say, to explore the possibility whether you can actually obtain genome sequences from such museum collections, I mean from, you can say, historical ancient material. Because that would open an avenue for exploring the genetics and the history of populations that have either been heavily mixed recently or have gone extinct, right, where you have hair from. And this is also what we find, there's no evidence of recent European mixture in the genome and we use hair because hair is not Paris or anything like that. So all contamination from all the people who have handled this hair over the years is all sitting on the surface. So by bleaching it, you can actually remove all the contamination. So you have the only thing that does you understand. Bone and teeth are Paris and it means that contamination, both in the form of microbes and but also people who have handled the specimens, actually penetrating very deep into bones and teeth while on hair. I mean, it's kind of like a plastic surface. I mean, it's all lying on the outside, so it's very easy to remove. So even though hair, you can say per gram of material contain much less DNA than bone and teeth normally, then you can say you can get a much cleaner result. Essentially what we're doing is trying to isolate all the DNA away from all the other components and from biological material. Now all biological material contains DNA to some extent. And as archaeogenitists, DNA specialists, we isolate the DNA away from all the cellular components, things like fats and proteins that are inside the hair shaft. We isolate that DNA away, we smash it up into lots of little pieces and then we shot gun sequencer, which means we randomly sequence every single piece of these small fragments. And then the billion piece jigsaw comes into place where we try and piece it all together to make a comprehensive picture. So that's what the new technology that we're putting forward here is about, essentially, is this using new sequencing technology to look at old samples. As people sort of move or have moved across the globe and even live in single places and populations intermingle and their DNA changes over time, and they leave behind genetic bread crumbs, if you like. And what we do when we get the genetic code is we're able to actually look at these pieces of DNA, how they've changed, similarities and differences and look at intermingling. So we can go from the genetic code through to some inference about what populations we're doing over time and how they moved. We've had a long time known that Aboriginal people have been in Australia for 40,000 now. We know 50,000 years, so the archaeological evidence has told us that. What this tells us is that it's been even longer, and we've had it's great difficulty in extending back that timeframe, some inkling that maybe there were some, there's two sites, possibly dated to 60,000, but they remain controversial and we haven't been able to duplicate them. So this is now giving us indication that people have been here or have been separated from other groups. For 70,000 years perhaps, and so now we have a timeframe that's much older. Australia has always been isolated, as we all know, and it's got unique foreigners, and it's also got this incredibly difficult sea crossing between it and Asia. So people must have had incredible amount of foresight, planning, communications and ability to conceptualise things. That is, they were modern people, they were just like us. So we know from archaeological evidence that whoever got here is, it's one of the earliest achievements in modern humans, which we like to get to Australia. But now we've pushed that achievement back from 50,000 to 70,000. In the southwest of WA, we've been working, my dad Charlie D'Aucham, studied this work in the 1970s at Devils there, which has got one of the longest sequences of cave occupation or occupation of any site in Australia. So that, that began at about 47 to 49,000 years ago. We, I was part of a team in the 1990s where we redated the sediments using limb nested techniques, a new method of dating. That site is pretty well dated, and it'd be a fantastic resource for looking at, it continues to be a fantastic resource for looking at human occupation. Well, I think we can, if we can recover human DNA from there, I mean, working with the traditional owners in the area, we, as we have with this current project, we will hopefully be able to recover enough human DNA to look at how people have arrived and where they came from and so on in that area. And that aside, there's also, of course, platen and more DNA in those sediments, which would be incredibly interesting. Began that research, because, you know, the Aboriginal people of the region that this sample came from, obviously have cultural concerns. The hair sample has cultural values well aside from the scientific value. And so they were concerned, firstly, about how the sample was collected, and then, you know, they had current contemporary concerns about the research that was being done on the hair sample. So I did some research into how the sample was collected, first of all, and found that it was taken by the Cambridge anthropologist Alfred Haddon, who caught the trans-Australian line across the country in 1923, and stopped at a small centre called Golden Ridge just outside of Calgoole, where he really would have only had the opportunity to collect the sample in a voluntary exchange. Aboriginal people were at that time trading artifacts and so on for food and money along the trans line, and obviously this was a little bit more unusual transaction, but someone gave up a hair sample and received whatever in return from Haddon, and that's how the sample found its way to Cambridge University. When the Goldfields Land and Sea Council, which represents the Aboriginal people of the region, when they learned about this research, they had some concerns about it. So, you know, as I said, did that research into the origins of the sample, and then Professor Villaslev came to Western Australia in June 2011 to discuss his research with the board, which, you know, was greatly appreciated, the respect that was shown and so on, and the board, which, as I say, represents the people of the region, gave there an unqualified endorsement. There's a lot of interest in the results, although not everyone accepts that the scientific discourse is the only explanation for people's origins in the desert, Nilswere. But there was no qualifications on having the research done.