Portal:Tasmania/Selected article/4

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The Tasmanian Aborigines were, or are, the indigenous people of the island state of Tasmania, Australia. In the space of thirty years (1803-1833), the population of the Tasmanian Aborigines was reduced from around 5,000 to around 300, largely from diseases introduced by British settlers. Since at least 1876, historians, scientists and anthropologists have held to the consensus that they became extinct with the death of the last full-blooded woman - Truganini. Within Australia there is an alternative view that aspects of their culture survive amongst those who are able to establish partial descent.

Those members of the modern-day descendent community who can claim ancestry to Tasmanian Aborigines are the result of the pre-colonisation Aboriginal population having been heavily interbred with later-arriving European settler communities. Almost all of the Indigenous Tasmanian language, and much of Tasmania's Aboriginal cultural heritage, have been lost. Currently there are some efforts to reconstruct one of the languages from the available wordlists and to revive the aboriginal culture from aspects maintained in some families who can trace their ascendancy from aboriginal people.