of the Aboriginal population of South Australia by the time of European contact are around 15,000 with a larger concentration in the southern part of the region. According to mitochondrial DNA research, Aboriginal people reached Eyre Peninsula 49,000-45,000 years ago from both the east (clockwise, along the coast, from northern Australia) and the west (anti-clockwise). Aboriginal society was made up of small bands, usually numbering around 25, which lived together on a daily basis and shared a particular range of land. The bands comprised one or more extended families, but the membership was fluid and would change depending on available food resources and personal circumstances. Several bands made up one clan, which also had a defined territory and was united by claimed descent from a single ancestor, and several clans made up one tribe, of which there were around 48 in South Australia by the time of European settlement. There was little uniting the clans of an Aboriginal tribe aside from their common language. The Aboriginal tribal groups all had Dreamings, which were religious traditions tying them to the land. The Dreamings serve as both stories about their ancestors and as the foundation of their societal laws. For example, for the Ngarrindjeri of the lower Murray River, the ancestral hero Ngurunderi fashioned the physical world and gave the people their laws. At the end of his life he traveled to Kangaroo Island, where he passed on to the sky-world. As a result, the Ngarrindjeri viewed the island as a stepping stone for the soul of a dead person to the under world. It was seen as a psychic landscape, not existing in a physical sense, and as a result the island was uninhabited by Aboriginal Australians when Europeans first arrived, and the archaeological record suggests that humans had last lived on Kangaroo Island 4000 years ago. European exploration The first Europeans to explore South Australia were the crew of a Dutch vessel, the Gulden Zeepaert, led by Captain François Thijssen in 1627. From Cape Leeuwin in Western Australia, the ship followed the southern coast of Australia east for 1,000 miles, reaching the edge of the Great Australian Bight. He named the whole area he'd explored Nuyts Land, after Pieter Nuyts, a distinguished passenger on the ship. In 1801–02 Matthew Flinders led the first circumnavigation of Australia aboard , a Royal Navy survey ship to verify that the eastern colony of