geografia: Oceania

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Oceania is a geographical region – or, in certain classifications, one of the world’s continents – including Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Spanning the Eastern and Western hemispheres, at the centre of the water hemisphere, Oceania is estimated to have a land area of about 9,000,000 square kilometres (3,500,000 sq mi) and a population of around 46.3 million as of 2024, including Australia but excluding the Malay Archipelago. When compared against other continental land areas, Oceania is the smallest and the second-least populated after Antarctica. It is home to Earth's third-largest remaining area of tropical rainforest, which covers much of the island of New Guinea. Oc…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

Aboriginal Australians are the various indigenous peoples of the Australian mainland and many of its islands, excluding the ethnically distinct people of the Torres Strait Islands. Humans first migrated to Australia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, and over time formed as many as 500 linguistic and territorial groups. Aboriginal people once lived across large areas of the continental shelf that were later inundated by postglacial sea-level rise at the start of the Holocene inter-glacial period, reshaping coastal landscapes and separating Tasmania from the mainland. Aboriginal people maintained extensive networks within the continent and certain groups maintained relationships with Torres Strait…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It has a land area of 7,688,287 km2 (2,968,464 sq mi), making it the sixth-largest country in the world, and is the world's flattest and driest inhabited continent. It is a megadiverse country, and its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes and climates, including large deserts centrally and tropical rainforests along the coast. The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians began arriving from Southeast Asia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Period. By the time of British settlement, Aboriginal Australians…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

Oceania is a geographical region with disputed borders but generally encompasses Australia, New Guinea, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. The prehistoric peopling of Oceania took place through two major expansion movements. The first occurred between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago and brought Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers from continental Asia to populate Insulindia, then nearby Oceania, i.e. New Guinea, Australia, and certain Melanesian islands. The second wave is more recent, starting around 6,000 years ago. Farmers and navigators from Taiwan, speaking Austronesian languages, populated Insulinde, i.e. the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. From the eastern islands of Indonesia, these…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

Solomon Islands is an archipelagic country consisting of six major islands and over 1,000 smaller islands in Melanesia, Oceania, to the north-east of Australia. It is adjacent to Bougainville to the west, New Caledonia and Vanuatu to the south-east, Fiji, Tuvalu, and Wallis and Futuna to the east, and the Federated States of Micronesia and Nauru to the north. It has a total area of 28,896 square kilometres (11,157 sq mi), and a population of 828,857 according to official estimates from 2025. Its capital and largest city, Honiara, is located on the largest island, Guadalcanal. The country takes its name from the wider area of the Solomon Islands archipelago, which is a collection of Melanesi…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 92

Genomic evidence supports the "long chronology" for the peopling of Sahul.. The timing of the settlement of Sahul-the Pleistocene landmass formed by present-day New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania that existed until ~9000 years ago (~9 ka)-remains highly contentious. The so-called "long chronology" posits the first main arrivals at ~60 to 65 ka, whereas a "short chronology" proposes 47 to 51 ka. Here, we exhaustively analyze an unprecedentedly large mitogenome dataset ( n = 2456) encompassing the full range of diversity from the indigenous populations of Australia, New Guinea, and Oceania, including a lineage related to those of New Guinea in an archaeological sample from Wallacea. We asses…

Evidence: 38 • authority: 72

The continent of Australia, sometimes known in technical contexts as Sahul (, sə-HOOL), Australia-New Guinea, Australinea, or Meganesia to distinguish it from the country of Australia, is located within the Southern and Eastern hemispheres, near the Maritime Southeast Asia. The continent includes mainland Australia, Tasmania, the island of New Guinea (Papua New Guinea and Western New Guinea), the Aru Islands, the Ashmore and Cartier Islands, most of the Coral Sea Islands, and some other nearby islands. Situated in the geographical region of Oceania, more specifically in the subregion of Australasia, Australia is the smallest of the seven traditional continents. The continent includes a cont…

Evidence: 30 • authority: 92

The impact of human dispersals and local interactions on the genetic diversity of coastal Papua New Guinea over the past 2,500 years.. The inhabitants of New Guinea and its outlying islands have played an important role in the human history of the Pacific region. Nevertheless, the genetic diversity, particularly of pre-colonial communities, is still understudied. Here we present the ancient genomes of 42 individuals from Papua New Guinea (PNG). The ancient genomic results of individuals from Watom Island (Bismarck Archipelago) and the south and northeastern coasts of PNG are contextualized with new (bio-) archaeological data. The individuals' accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dates span 2…

Evidence: 22 • authority: 92

Simulation of phased alerting of community first responders for cardiac arrest.. Background Community First Responders (CFRs) are commonly used for out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, and advanced systems send so-called phased alerts: notifications with built-in time delays. The policy that defines these delays affects both response times and volunteer fatigue. Methods We compare alert policies by Monte Carlo Simulation, estimating patient survival, coverage, number of alerts and redundant CFR arrivals. In the simulation, acceptance probabilities and response delays are bootstrapped from 29,307 rows of historical data covering all GoodSAM alerts in New Zealand between 1-12-2017 and 30-11-2020.…

Evidence: 22 • authority: 72

This is a list of dates associated with the prehistoric peopling of the world (the first known presence of Homo sapiens). The list is divided into four categories: Middle Paleolithic (before 50,000 years ago), Upper Paleolithic (50,000 to 12,500 years ago), Holocene (12,500 to 500 years ago) and Modern (Age of Sail and modern exploration). List entries are identified by region (in the case of genetic evidence spatial resolution is limited), country or island, with the date of the first known or hypothesised modern human presence (or "settlement", although Paleolithic humans were not sedentary). Human "settlement" does not necessarily have to be continuous; settled areas in some cases become…

Evidence: 22 • authority: 72

The history of Oceania includes the history of Australia, Easter Island, Fiji, Hawaii, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Western New Guinea and, other Pacific island nations.

Evidence: — • authority: 92

Sedimentary biomarkers of human presence and taro cultivation reveal early horticulture in Remote Oceania.. Remote Oceania was among the last places settled by humans. However, the timing of initial human settlements and the early introduction of horticulture remain debated. We retrieved a sediment core close to Teouma, the oldest cemetery in Remote Oceania that reveals evidence of initial settlement, horticulture practice, and concurrent climatic conditions on the island of Efate, Vanuatu. Sedimentary biomarkers indicating human presence (coprostanol and epicoprostanol), and taro cultivation (palmitone), increase simultaneously, attesting to the early introduction of horticulture by first…