Humans migrated out of Africa and went to Australia some 65,000 years ago via India and Southeast Asia, a new study reported by The New York Times has said.

Geneticists studied the DNA of "an ancient people" in Malaysia, leading them to unravel many aspects of how modern humans migrated from Africa.

"The geneticists say there was only one migration of modern humans out of Africa; that it took a southern route to India, Southeast Asia and Australia; and that it consisted of a single band of hunter-gatherers, probably just a few hundred people strong," the newspaper reported.

 The paper quoted a report in Science journal by a team of geneticists led by Vincent Macaulay of the University of Glasgow. The migration occurred during the last Ice Age making Europe too cold to be inhabited then. It was an offshoot of people who came from India and Iran that eventually reached Europe.

The findings are drawn from an analysis of mitochondrial DNA, genetic material inherited solely through the female line, the paper said. "Everyone in the world can be placed on a single family tree, in terms of their mitochondrial DNA, because everyone has inherited that piece of DNA from a single woman, the mitochondrial Eve, who lived some 200,000 years ago," it said.

Macaulay's team calculated that the emigration from Africa occurred 65,000 years ago, reached the coasts of India and Southeast Asia to eventually make its way to Australia 50,000 years ago.

The Malaysian people whom the geneticists studied were described as the Orang Asli.

While some archaeologists say that Europe was colonised by a second migration that came north out of Africa, Macaulay's team says there could have been just one migration.

"Therefore, people from the southern migration, probably in India, must have struck inland to reach the Levant and, later, Europe," the report said.

--Indo-Asian News Service