to describe Aboriginal peoples of the Sydney region, despite there being "no evidence that Aboriginal people had used it in 1788 as the name of a language or group of people inhabiting the Sydney peninsula". With a traditional heritage spanning thousands of years, approximately 70 per cent of the Eora people died out during the nineteenth century as a result of the genocidal policies of colonial Australia, smallpox and other viruses, and the destruction of their natural food sources. Earliest habitation Radiocarbon dating suggests human activity occurred in and around Sydney for at least 30,000 years, in the Upper Paleolithic period. However, numerous Aboriginal stone tools found in Sydney's far western suburbs gravel sediments were dated to be from 45,000 to 50,000 years BP, which would mean that humans could have been in the region earlier than thought. First European records Dharug people recognise William Dawes of the First Fleet and flagship, the Sirius, as the first to record the original traditional tongue of the elder people of Sydney Dharugule-wayaun. Dawes was returned to England in December 1791, after disagreements with Governor Phillip on, among other things, the punitive expedition launched following the wounding of the Government gamekeeper, allegedly by Pemulwuy, a Yora man. Loss of language The Indigenous population of Sydney gradually started using English more in everyday usage, as well as New South Wales Pidgin. This, combined with social upheaval, meant that the local Dharug language started to fade from use in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. A wordlist of the local Sydney language was published by William Ridley in 1875, and he noted that, at that time, very few fluent speakers were left. Revival The Dharug language had largely been lost, mainly due to the historical effects of colonisation on the speakers. Some vocabulary had been retained by some Dharug people, but only very little grammar and phonology. For many years non-Aboriginal academics collected resources for Aboriginal languages to preserve them, and more recently, Aboriginal people have been getting involved in the process, and designing tools to reclaim the languages. During the 1990s and the new millennium, some descendants of the Dharug clans in Western Sydney have been making considerable efforts to revive Dharug as a spoken language. In the 21st century, some modern Dharug speakers have given speeches in a reconstructed form of the Dharug language, and younger members of the community visit schools and give