Tasmanians

Aboriginal Tasmanians are the Aboriginal people of the Australian island of Tasmania, located south of the mainland. At the time of European contact, Aboriginal Tasmanians were divided into a number of distinct ethnic groups. For much of the 20th century, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were widely, and erroneously, thought of as extinct and intentionally exterminated by white settlers. Contemporary figures (2016) for the number of people of Tasmanian Aboriginal descent vary according to the criteria used to determine this identity, ranging from 6,000 to over 23,000.