The Eora (also Yura) are an Aboriginal Australian people of New South Wales. Eora is the name given by the earliest European settlers to a group of Aboriginal people belonging to the clans along the coastal area of what is now known as the Sydney basin, in New South Wales, Australia. The Eora share a language with the Darug people, whose traditional lands lie further inland, to the west of the Eora. Contact with the first white settlement's bridgehead into Australia quickly devastated much of the population through epidemics of smallpox and other diseases. Their descendants live on, though their languages, social system, way of life and traditions are mostly lost. 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. Ethnonym The word "Eora" has been used as an ethnonym by non-Aboriginal people since 1899, 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". Since the late 20th century it has also come to be used as an ethnonym by Aboriginal people too. The word first appears in the wordlists of First Fleet officers, where it was mostly translated as "men" or "people": Collins's wordlist is the only original wordlist that does not translate the term as "men" or "people", however in the text of his Account, Collins uses the word to mean "black men", specifically in contrast to white men: Conversing with Bennilong … [I observed] that all the white men here came from England. I then asked him where the black men (or Eora) came from? In The Sydney Language (1994), Troy respells the word "Eora" as yura and translates it as "people, or Aboriginal people". In addition to this entry for "people, or Aboriginal people", Troy also gives an entry for "non-Aboriginal person", for which she lists the terms wadyiman, djaraba, djibagalung, and barawalgal . The distinction between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, observed by Troy and the primary sources, is also found in other Australian languages. For example, Giacon observes that Yuwaalaraay speakers used different lexical items for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal