justaevolvedchimp1784080816

For decades, historians argued smallpox arrived in Australia via Indonesian traders in the north. They were wrong. Indigenous oral histories always pointed to the British. Now, advanced epidemiological models have finally proven it. A pathogen entering from the north could never have reached Sydney. But the second half of these new studies holds the real shock. The pre-colonial Indigenous population wasn’t a few hundred thousand. It was 2.5 million. By 1861, disease and frontier violence had wiped out 2.4 million people. A centuries-old mathematical cover-up is finally coming undone.