Today, the word aborigine usually denotes the original inhabitants of Australia.
They arrived on that isolated continent by boat from southeast Asia more than 50,000 years ago.
Through time, the Aborigines developed a complex and diverse culture made up of thousands of smaller groups, each with its own stories and myths.
At the beginning of the 1800s, the Aborigines spoke more than 200 distinct languages.
More than 400 distinct Australian Aboriginal peoples have been identified across the Australian continent, each distinguished by unique names for groups of people’s ancestral languages, dialects, or distinctive speech mannerisms.
