Anthropologists believe the original inhabitants of American may have actually come from Australia.
    The ancestors of today's native Americans came over the land bridge from Siberia and believe they were there first settlers. But the oldest native American skull found so far is around 9000 years old, whereas a long-faced female skull has been carbon dated to 12,700 years ago.
    Silvia Gonzalez, from John Moores University in Liverpool, England, believes the first migration came from Australia via Japan and Polynesia and down the Pacific Coast of America.
    This belief may be backed up by the accounts of Spanish missionaries who told of an isolated coastal community of long-face people in Baja California who were a completely different race from other communities in America at the time, and practised different rituals. The last remnants of this race were wiped out by diseases introduced with the Spanish.

Source: Reuters (6 September 2004)