According to a new study, people from the Indian subcontinent reached Australia about 4,000 years ago, several hundreds of years before the Europeans colonizers arrived in the land down under.

A new research published on Tuesday found evidence indicating that the Australian aboriginal and Indian genes are mixed. The study conducted by researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany found evidence of a flow of between Indian population and Australia aboriginals about 4,000 years ago.

The study also suggested that the migration also influenced the people inhabiting Australia at that time. It is be believed that the Australian wild dog, Dingo and stone tool technologies that changed the lives of Australian aboriginals, may have come from India at that time. The study noted a sudden change in the archaeological record of Australia including the appearance of plant processing and stone tool technologies and the identification of dingo in the fossil record.

Lead researcher Irina Pugach said, "Since we detect inflow of genes from India into Australia at around the same time, it is likely that these changes were related to this migration. We have estimated the amount of Indian contribution to Australian genomes at around 10%, but this number doesn't tell us anything about how many individuals might have migrated."

She also said that the amount of Indian ancestry might have enlarged if the Australian population was less at that time. Australia holds some of the oldest evidence of human presence besides African continent and this makes Australian aboriginals, one of the oldest continuous populations outside Africa.