FIRST HOMININS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

EARLY HUMAN ANCESTORS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Homo erectus skull from Java

As of 200,000 years ago, there were four different hominin species inhabited Asia — Homo erectus, Denisovans and small island-dwelling peoples called Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis in Flores, Indonesia and Luzon Philippines respectively. Our species, modern humans, joined the mix about 70,000 to 100,000 years ago.

During ice ages, when sea levels were low, land bridges connected Sumatra, Java, Bali and Borneo with Southeast Asia. The Philippines and the Indonesian islands of Sulawesi, Lombok, Flores, Timor and the Moluccas were not connected by land bridges to Southeast Asia. Land bridges connected New Guinea and Australia with each other but not with Indonesia or Southeast Asia.

It was long thought that early man was unable to migrate past the 15-mile-wide Lombok Straight between Bali and Lombok. Stone flakes possibly produced by humans have been found in 730,000-year-old deposits on Flores, which has been offered as evidence that early man was able to cross the Lombok Strait.

The oldest evidence of early human habitation in Southeast Asia are stone hand-axes unearthed in the historical site of Lenggong in Malaysia dating back 1.83 million years. Some scientists however are skeptical about the dates

The area's first known human-like inhabitant, about 1.5 million years ago was "Java Man" (first classified as Pithecanthropus erectus, then subsequently named a part of the species Homo erectus). Recently discovered was a species of human, dubbed "Flores Man" of "Hobbit" (Homo floresiensis), a miniature hominid that grew only three or four feet tall. Flores Man seems to have shared some islands with Java Man until only 10,000 years ago, when they became extinct. +

Homo Erectus in Southeast Asia

Homo erectus sites in Asia

Homo erectus is believed to have migrated across the land bridges from Southeast Asia as far a Java 1.5 million years ago. There is also evidence that Homo erectus may have survived in Southeast Asia until 25,000 years ago (See Java Man below). Homo erectus had a considerably larger brain than its predecessor Homo habilis. It fashioned more advanced tools (double-edged, teardrop-shaped "hand axes" and "cleavers" ) and controlled fire (based on the discovery of charcoal with erectus fossils). Better foraging and hunting skills, allowed it to exploit its environment better than “Homo habilis “

About 1,000,000 years ago, Homo erectus is believed to have moved from Africa where it had originated, to Asia.. It is thought to have lived in the mouth of caves near streams or other water supplies and coexusted with animals such as giant hyenas, sabre-toothed tigers, orangutan, and giant pandas.

Fossil tools over 500,000 years are often presumed to be from homo erectus even though there is no direct evidence of this and they could conceivably come from any hominin or even a smart monkey or other animal. This appears to be the case with some fossils discovered in northern Vietnam dating to approximately 500,000 years ago and attributed to homo erectus. In 1999, Somsak Pramankit claimed to have found skull fragments of Homo erectus in Ko Kha, Lampang in Thailand , though most scholars do not recognize these finds as credible. The fossils was comparable to skull fossils of Java Man and Peking Man.

Early Homos in Southeast Asia

In 2004, scientists announced the discovery of the remains of seven hominins on the island of Flores, east of Bali, dated to 95,000 and 12,000 years ago. The bones were first thought to be children but were later confirmed to be a new hominin species, considerably smaller than modern humans, and thus nicknamed Hobbits. The finding received headlines around the globe and caused jaws to drop in astonishment throughout the scientific community. [Source: Mike Norwood, Thomas Sutikna and Richard Robert, National Geographic, April 2005]

Discovered in 2003,the new hominins were given the name the “ Homo floresiernsis”. About 1.1 meters tall, they had unusually long, flat feet and a brain the size of a grapefruit. They existed at the same time as modern humans and are thought to have descended from “ Homo erectus” and arrived in Flores perhaps as long as 840,000 years, the period in which stone stools found on Flores have been dated. Hominins on the island had to have arrived by sea because even during ice ages reaching Flores required a 15 mile sea crossing. Dating was done with carbon dating of charcoal found near the fossils and luminescence dating of the sediments in which the fossils were found.

There is a good evidence that a relatively large human that lived 700,000 years ago and shrunk quickly and stayed that size ago is an ancestor of

Asian Homo erectus woman

Homo floresiensis according to two studies published in Nature in June 2016. Marlowe Hood of AFP wrote: “A modest haul of teeth and bones from an adult and two children has bolstered the theory that Homo floresiensis arrived on Flores island as a different, larger species of hominin, or early man, probably about a million years ago. And then, something very strange happened. These upright, tool-wielding humans shrank, generation after generation, until they were barely half their original weight and height. [Source: Marlowe Hood, AFP, June 9, 2016 \^/]

The origin of Homo floresiensis (the hobbits of Indonesia) raises some interesting questions, one being that they could be descendants of predecessor of homo erectus —homo habalis or even a Australopithecus species — and this in turn could mean homo habalis or Australopithecus species could have emerged from Africa before Homo erectus.

Deborah Netburn wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “One hypothesis posits that Homo floresiensis descended from the large-bodied hominin Homo erectus that lived between 1.89 million and 143,000 years ago. Scientists say it is possible that Homo erectus may have arrived on Flores from Java, perhaps after being washed out to sea by a tsunami. Over time, this species began to shrink on its new island home – a relatively common phenomenon known as island dwarfism. “Lots of animals that end up on islands get smaller for a variety of reasons like limited food sources, or because there are no large predators to stay big for,” said Karen Baab, a paleoanthropologist at Midwestern University in Glendale, Ariz., who was not involved in the study. “We even see it in modern humans in certain environments that are home to pygmy populations.” [Source: Deborah Netburn, Los Angeles Times, June 8, 2016 */]

1.83 Million-year-old Stone Tools Found in Malaysia

The oldest evidence of early human habitation in Southeast Asia was discovered in 2008 when stone hand-axes were unearthed in the historical site of Lenggong in Malaysia dating back 1.83 million years. Archeology News reported: Mokhtar Saidin of the Universiti Sains Malaysia Centre for Archaeological Research and his team “found a suevite axe as well as flake and chopping tools in 2008, in rocks churned up by lorries in an area called Bukit Bunuh. The hand-held axe Mokhtar uncovered looked good for slicing hide, cutting meat or dismembering carcasses. [Source: New Straits Times, May 22, 2011, archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.jp ]

“The Lenggong Valley is home to a number of prehistoric sites, with important archaeological findings. These include Kota Tampan, Bukit Jawa at Kampung Gelok and Kampung Temelong. The most famous archaeological finding in Lenggong is Perak Man, the 11,000-year-old human skeletal remains discovered in 1991. The Lenggong Archaeological Museum at Kota Tampan is a trove of prehistoric Malaya. While the stone age of Lenggong has been well documented and said to go back 200,000 years, the recent tool finds are startling in their age. “I took back the axe to USM and sent it through a CT scan. It read 1.7 to 1.8 million years old,” says Mokhtar, holding up a suevite rock in the oil palm plantation. “We then sent it for fission track dating by the Geochronology Laboratory in Tokyo, which put it down to about 1.83 ± 0.61 million years old. Stone axe head “That makes the tools here the oldest in the world to date. The ones in Africa — the oldest stone hand axe — is 1.5 million years old.”

In 2010, Mokhtar found several fragments of bone, including a long bone and a finger, embedded in a suevite rock. He said, “I was here (in Bukit Bunuh) in 1987 and 1989. The area was a rubber plantation, then. It was turned into an oil palm plantation in 2001, and the workers started to terrace the hills... that’s when the stones started coming up.” After checking with a fellow professor, a meteor theory was reached. On checking the area, the theory was right. He tells us a meteor struck the area, which used to be part of Raban Lake, near Kuala Kangsar, about that time. This is metasediment rock in Bukit Bunuh showing meteor impact evidence “Lenggong Valley was all under Raban Lake then. When the meteor hit, it changed the course of Perak river.” The area under excavation is about 400 sq km. Mokhtar and his team started excavations from 2001, and unearthed a Palaeolithic culture. The suevite tools are found in rocks formed in and around impact craters. These rocks are recorded to exist in Europe so far, specifically Germany. There have been reports of similar craters in Langkawi, and the border between Terengganu and Pahang. Mokhtar points out the ridges of the crater, which is about four kilometres in diameter, and totally covered by oil palm trees.

“The main criteria for the paleolithic people to settle anywhere is food and water. This old lake must have been ideal. They needed river gravel to make stone tools. “The people who were making these tools, they had the hands-on technology. They knew how to choose which rock, to make what tool. They designed the tools. These people had the knowledge then, 1.83 million years ago,” he muses. “The distance from here to Africa is 1,800km. Maybe they came from Africa. That’s the out-of-Africa theory of homo erectus. Prof Dr Mokhtar Saidin pointing out that the impact rocks are easily unearthed beneath the top layer “Then there is the multiregional theory, where different regions had their own human evolution.”

Based on world evidence, some of the oldest hominin homo erectus remains, including tools and teeth, were found in Jawa, Indonesia (1.7 to 1.2 million years ago), Dmanisi, Georgia (1.8-1.7 million years), Longgupo, China (1.8-1.6 million years), and Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania (1.8 million years). He says there is new evidence which gives rise to the possibility that the hominids in Jawa could have come from Bukit Bunuh because of the impact of the meteor. “I think the paleolithic people in Bukit Bunuh —maybe about 1,000 of them lived here — are a new species of modern humans, homo sapiens. “We know now that the Lenggong Valley was inhabited from time to time for more than 1.83 million years. We have the oldest prehistoric settlement in the world after Africa, according to chronometric dating.”

Java Man

Homo erectus jawbones from Java

Java man was discovered by Eugene DuBois, a young Dutch military doctor, who came to Java in 1887 with the sole purpose of finding the "missing link" between humans and apes after hearing about discoveries of ancient human bones (which later turned out to belong to modern man) near the Javanese village of Wajak, near Tulung Agung, in eastern Java.

With the help of 50 East Indian convict laborers, he discovered a skull cap and thighbone—that clearly didn't belong to an ape—along the banks of the Sunngai Bengawan Solo River in 1891. After measuring the cranial capacity of the skull with mustard seeds, Dubois realized that the creature was more of an "ape-like man" than a "man-like ape." Dubois dubbed the find “Pithecanthropus erectus “, or "upright ape-man,” which is now regarded as an example of “Homo erectus “.

The discovery of Java Man was the first major hominid find, and helped launch the study of early man. His finding created such a storm of controversy that Dubois felt compelled to re-bury the bones for 30 years to protect them. DuBois was the student of Ernst Haeckel, a Charles Darwin disciple who wrote “History of Natural Creation “ (1947), which advocated the Darwinian view of evolution and speculated about primitive human beings. Dubois came to Indonesia with the ambition of confirming Haekel’s theories. He died a bitter man because his discoveries he felt weren't taken seriously.

After Dubois other Homo erectus bones were unearthed in Java. In the 1930s, Ralph von Koenigswald found fossils, dated at be 1 million years old, near the village of Sangiran, along the Solo river, 15 kilometers north of Solo. Other fossils have been found along the Sungai Bengawan Solo in Central and East Java and near Pacitan in East Java’s south coast. In 1936 a skull of a child was found at Perning neat Mojokerto.

In 1994, Berkeley scientist Carl Swisher shook up the paleontology world when he redated the volcanic sediments of a “Homo erectus “ Java man skull using a sophisticated mass spectrometer— that accurately measure the radioactive decay rates of potassium and argon found in volcanic sediments—and found that the skull was 1.8 million years old instead of 1 million years old as was previously reported. His discovery placed “Homo erectus “ in Indonesia, some 800,000 years before it was thought to have left Africa. Critics of Swisher's findings say that the skull may have been washed into older sediments. In response his critics Swisher has dated numerous sediment samples taken where hominid fossils were found in Indonesia and found that most of the sediments were 1.6 million years old or older.

In addition to that “Homo erectus “ fossils found at site called Ngandong in Indonesia, previously thought to be between 100,000 and 300,000 years old, were dated in strata between 27,000 and 57,000 years old. This implies that “Homo erectus “ live much longer than anyone thought and “Homo erectus “ and “Homo sapiens “ existed at the same time on Java. Many scientists are skeptical about the Ngandong dates.

Book: “Java Man “ by Carl Swisher, Garniss Curtis and Roger Lewis.

Out of Africa Theory

There are various theories describing how migration patterns played a part in the development of early humans. The traditional, widely-accepted "Single Origin, Out of Africa Theory" of human evolution posits that earliest hominids evolved in Africa; that Australopithecus species evolved into Homo species in Africa; that early Homo species migrated to Asia and the Old World from Africa between a million and two million years ago; and that Homo sapiens also evolved in Africa.

According to the “Out of Africa" theory there were two migrations of African-born Homo species. First, Homo erectus began slowly moving into the Middle East, Europe and Asia between a million and two million years ago. Homo erectus splintered into numerous colonies that developed separately from one another. None of the colonies outside of Africa contributed to the development of Homo sapiens , which also originally evolved in Africa.

Proponents of the Out of Africa theory argue that Homo erectus spread across Africa during the first 800,000 years after first appearing 1.8 million years ago. It moved to Asia but for some reason stayed out Europe. They argue that all modern humans have evolved from African Homo species. Recent dating of fossils in Georgia, China and Indonesia suggests that Homo erectus may have migrated into Asia as early as 2 million years ago and migrated across the continent very quickly. This conclusion is based on fossils found in Georgia, China and Indonesia that have been dated to be between 1.7 million and 1.9 million years old.

Hominids are thought to have most likely migrated across what is called the Levantine Corridor through what is now Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon. It embraces the Jordan River and the Dead Sea and a geologic zone that included the Red Sea which began opening up between the African and Arabian tectonic plates around 2 million years ago, the time the first migrants were thought to have emerged from Africa. At that time the Levantine Corridor was a verdant area with lakes and lots of animals and plants that could have been consumed as food.

Out of Africa

Evidence for the “Out of Africa” theory includes a trail of stone tools, including carefully-crafted hand axes, that appear to have originated in Africa. Scientists also point out that many sophisticated hand ax are found in Africa but none have been found in Asia. Thousands of primitive 1.5-million- to 1.4-million-year-old hand axes have been found in Ubeidya, Israel in the Levantine Corridor. Ubeidya is a vanished lake just south of the Sea of Galilee. Stone tools and fossils of large mammals found near the tools have been dated to 1.4 million years ago. Hand axes similar to one found there have been found throughout Europe and Asia. Hand axes found north of Lake Tiberias suggests there was another round migration through the Levantine Corridor around 780,000 years ago.

Genetic studies of 28 of China's 56 ethnic groups, published by the Chinese Human Genae Diversity Project in 2000, indicate that the first Chinese descended from Africans who migrated their way along the Indian Ocean and made their way to China via Southeast Asia.

Multiregional and Out of Asia Theory

The redating of Java Man to be 1.7 million years old instead of 1 million years old and the discovery of some old hominid fossils in China has led some scientists question the "Out of Africa Theory" and suggest a more complex the "Multiregional Hypothesis." According to "Multiregional Hypothesis," separate regional populations of Homo Erectus may have evolved into Homo Sapiens while intermingling with one another. Other suggest that a separate Asian and African species arose and that the Asian species later died out. [Source: Michael Lemonick, Time, March 14, 1994]

According to the "Multiregional Theory" Homo erectus evolved in Africa but it was a highly variable species whose descendants formed regional races after it migrated into Asia and Europe. Traces of the regional difference can still be found in modern races today (i.e., the shovel-like shape of the incisor teeth of East Asian people). The races evolved in near isolation but there was enough intermingling so that did't evolve into separate species. Proponents of the Multiregional Theory refute the genetic diversity argument of the Out of Africa theorists by arguing that population size could account for the differences. In the 19th century viewpoints similar to the Multiregional Theory were used to support racist views that some races were inferior to others and to justify slavery. Recent discoveries of early modern man in Ethiopia and South Africa and Homo erectus in Dmanisi Georgia have led most scientists to throw out Multiregional Theory.

Some scientists have theorized that an early hominid such as homo habilis left Africa two million years ago and moved into Asia, where it evolved into Homo erectus then spread to Europe and back to Africa. This theory is based on the fact that the Homo erectus specimens found in Asia are older than those found in Africa.

Evidence for this theory includes extraordinarily old dates for Homo species that appeared in Indonesia and China just as Homo erectus was emerging in Africa. Berkeley's Carl Swisher told Time magazine that "elephants left Africa several times during their history" and "lots of animals expand their ranges. the main factor may have been an environmental change that made the expansion easier. No other animals needed stone tools to get out of Africa." [Source: Michael Lemonick, Time, March 14, 1994]

One primatologist told National Geographic: "The idea that all hominids originated in Africa is a myth created by people working in Africa. Sure, they've found a lot there, but if we'd invested that much time and money in Asia we would find fossil hominids just as old there too." Some Homo erectus tools have been found in Africa and Europe but not in Asia. Scientists say that the reason for this is that they may have used equally effective bamboo tools—instead of stone ones—that decay and leave behind no evidence.

Hominids Cross the Wallace Line

Stone flake tools, found near a stegodons (ancient elephant), dated to 840,000 years ago, were found in the Soa Basin on Indonesian island of Flores. The tools are thought to have belonged to Homo Erectus. They only way to get the island is by boat, through sometimes turbulent seas, which implies “Homo erectus “ built seaworthy rafts or some other kind of vessel. This discovery is regarded with caution but may mean that early hominids may have cross the Wallace Line 650,000 years earlier than previously thought.

During several ice ages when sea levels dropped Indonesia was connected to the Asian continent. It is believed that Homo erectus arrived in Indonesia during one of the ice ages.

The Wallace Line is an invisible biological barrier described by and named after the British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace. Running along the water between the Indonesia islands of Bali and Lombok and between Borneo and Sulawesi, it separates the species found in Australia, New Guinea and the eastern islands of Indonesia from those found in western Indonesia, the Philippines and the Southeast Asia.

Because of the Wallace Line Asian animals such as elephants, orangutans and tigers never ventured further east than Bali, and Australian animals such as kangaroos, emus, cassowaries, wallabies and cockatoos never made it to Asia. Animals from both continents are found in some parts of Indonesia.

The first people to cross the Wallace line from Bali to Lombok, Indonesia, scientists speculate, arrived in a kind of paradise free of predators and competitors. Crustaceans and mollusks could be collected from tidal flats and pygmy elephants unafraid of man could be easily hunted. When food supplies ran low, the early inhabitants moved on to the next island, and the next until the finally reached Australia.

The discovery of the Hobbits in Flores is thought to confirm that Homo Erectus crossed the Wallace Line. See Hobbits of Indonesia.

Homo Floresiensis: Hobbits of Indonesia

In 2004, scientists announced the discovery of the remains of seven hominins on the island of Flores, east of Bali, dated to 95,000 and 50,000 years ago. The bones were first thought to be children but were later confirmed to be a new hominin species, considerably smaller than modern humans, and thus nicknamed Hobbits. The finding received headlines around the globe and caused jaws to drop in astonishment throughout the scientific community. [Source: Mike Norwood, Thomas Sutikna and Richard Robert, National Geographic, April 2005]

Remains dated to be 18,000 years old were found in September 2003 in a cave in eastern Flores known to the local Manggarai people as Liang Bua. The remains included the skull, pelvis, leg, arm and foot bones of a female; the lower jaw from another adult; and flaked stone tools, perhaps arrow heads or spear points. Wear on the teeth indicated the creatures were adults not children. The presence of a number of individuals the same size indicated the remains weren’t from modern human stunted by disease, malnutrition or dwarfism.

Ancestors of Homo Floresiensis (Hobbits), 700,000 Years Ago

Homo Floresiensis

There is a good evidence that a relatively large human that lived 700,000 years ago and shrunk quickly and stayed small is an ancestor of Homo floresiensis according to two studies published in Nature in June 2016. Marlowe Hood of AFP wrote: “A modest haul of teeth and bones from an adult and two children has bolstered the theory that Homo floresiensis arrived on Flores island as a different, larger species of hominin, or early man, probably about a million years ago. And then, something very strange happened. These upright, tool-wielding humans shrank, generation after generation, until they were barely half their original weight and height. [Source: Marlowe Hood, AFP, June 9, 2016 \^/]

“The process, called "island dwarfism," was well known in animals, with some species shrinking as much as six fold in adapting to an environment with fewer resources. Indeed, Flores was also home to a miniature race of elephant-like creatures — possibly hunted to extinction by the mini-men — called Stegodons. This is the first hard evidence of humans becoming smaller after being marooned on a spit of land transformed into an island by rising seas. "The hobbit was real," said Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at the Research Centre of Human Evolution at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, and lead author of one of the studies. "It was an ancient human species that is separate to ours and that no longer exists on the planet today." \^/

“The new fossils were unearthed in central Flores in 2014, about 100 kilometres (70 miles) from the 2003 discovery of the hobbit remains. The find provided partial answers to key questions: from which species did H. floresiensis evolve, and how long did it take to shrink? Two plausible evolutionary scenarios remain regarding their origins, said Brumm. "The first is that the 'hobbits' represent a kind of dwarfed Homo erectus from Java," he told AFP.” But this theory has largely been dismissed. "The alternative theory is that these creatures descend from an earlier radiation of more archaic, small-boned hominins from Africa." \^/

Homo Luzonensis and the First Hominins in the Philippines 700,000 Years Ago

In 2018, evidence of hominins dated to over 700,000 years ago was discovered at the Kalinga site in northern Luzon in the northern Philippines. Hominins (similar to hominids) are humans, direct ancestors of humans, or species closely related to humans. The find — which pushed back the arrival of humans in the Philippines by around 640,000 years, from 67,000 years ago to around 709,000years ago — was made by an international team of researchers who studied 57 stone tools found at the Kalinga site alongside rhinoceros bones that showed evidence of cut marks made while butchering them. Some of the bones had also been smashed open, suggesting that people were after the nutrient-rich marrow.[Source: Zach Zorich, Archaeology magazine, September-October 2018]

Before the discovery described above, the earliest evidence of hominins in the Philippines was Calloa Cave also in Cagayan Valley of northern Luzon not far from Kalinga. In 2007 and 2010, archaeologists Dr. Armand Mijares with Dr. Phil Piper found bones in a cave near Peñablanca, Cagayan that were dated to be 67,000 years old. At that time they were the earliest human fossil ever found in Asia-Pacific. [Source: Wikipedia]

The hominins found in Calloa Cave were named Homo luzonensis and dubbed as Callao Man. They were initially tentatively labeled to be modern humans (Homo sapiens) but were very small and appeared to have come from individuals who had a form of dwarfism or were a different hominin species.

Hominins in Sulawesi 118,000 Years Ago

Archaic humans arrived on Sulawesi — an island in Indonesia just east of Borneo — at least 118,000 years ago, 60,000 years older than previously thought, based on the 2015 discovery of deposit of stone tools and extinct animal bones. Archaeology magazine reported: It is known that various hominin species made it to the islands of Flores, Java, and Papua by this time, and it was assumed that Sulawesi was part of their dispersal. This new find, accumulated over what appears to have been tens of thousands of years, suggests there was, in fact, a well-established population. There are no human fossils, so it is unknown what ancient human species it was. [Source: Samir S. Patel, Archaeology magazine, May-June 2016]

The University of Woolongong reported: It has long been believed that humans first entered the island sometime between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago. In 2016, a research team, led by the University of Wollongong’s Dr Gerrit van den Bergh, reported, in Nature the existence of stone artefacts on Sulawesi dated to more than 100,000 years using the latest generation of luminescence dating technique for feldspars minerals. Dr van den Bergh’s team, from the Centre for Archaeological Science (CAS), excavated an open-air site called Talepu in the south western arm of Sulawesi and unearthed stone tools, together with the fossil remains of extinct and extant megafauna. [Source: Bernie Goldie,University of Woolongong, January 14, 2016].

The excavations went down to a 12-meter depth. “It now seems that before modern humans entered the island, there might have been pre-modern hominins on Sulawesi at a much earlier stage,” Dr van den Bergh said, adding it was possible that — like the island of Flores where the ‘Hobbit’ (Homo floresiensis) fossils were discovered in the 2000s — fossils of pre modern humans may yet be found on Sulawesi. “Sulawesi, like Flores, could have been a natural laboratory for human evolution under isolated conditions,” .

Denisovans in Laos in 150,000 Years Ago

In May 2022, scientists announced they had found a molar belonging to a young Denisovan girl in cave Tam Ngu Hao 2, also known as Cobra Cave, in the Annamite Mountains in northeastern Laos. Denisovans are an extinct group of hominins who coexisted with the Neanderthals and modern humans around 30,000 to 50,000 years ago and originated at least 200,000 years ago. They are more closely related to Neanderthals than modern humans and interbred with both species

Denisovan tooth from Laos

The tooth, dated to between 164,000 and 131,000 years old, belonged to a girl about 4-6 years old has revealed the Denisovan’s resourcefulness in adapting to both tropical and cold climates. The only other known Denisovan fossils are a few teeth and bone fossils from a single site in Siberia and one in the Himalayas. The humid Laotian conditions meant ancient DNA was not preserved in the molar, unlike other Denisovan remains. The researchers determined it was Denisovan based on its shape — short and heavily wrinkled — and enamel characteristics. Ancient proteins indicated the molar came from a girl. "This is the first time that a Denisovan has been found in a warm region," said paleoanthropologist Fabrice Demeter of the University of Copenhagen's Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Communications "It means that they were adapted to opposite environments, from cold and high altitude to warm and low altitude regions. In this regard, they were like us, modern humans," Demeter added. [Source: Will Dunham, Reuters, May 18, 2022]

The Laotian cave is located about 3,800 kilometers (2,400 miles) from the Siberian cave, where the first Denisovan fossils were found. "We would like to know a great deal more about Denisovans. But I think it's important to know that just like the Neanderthals were known from Western Europe and the Near East, the Denisovans were a similar and closely related species that was found across a huge part of Asia," University of Illinois paleoanthropologist and study co-author Laura Shackelford said. "Unfortunately, we know very little about what they looked like since there are so few fossils available," Shackelford said, noting that Denisovans probably shared some Neanderthal facial and dental traits.

Scientists have been searching in northeastern Laos for decades for prehistoric human remains. The cave bearing the tooth was situated near another where 70,000-year-old Homo sapiens remains were found. The girl's molar was embedded in sedimentary rock called breccia on a cave wall also containing bone fragments and teeth from animals including ancient rhinos and elephants. "We did not expect to actually find a Denisovan tooth in Laos," Demeter said.

Bamboo Tools and the Scarcity of Advanced Stone Tools in East Asia

Kathleen Tibbetts of SMU wrote: “The long-held theory that prehistoric humans in East Asia crafted tools from bamboo was devised to explain a lack of evidence for advanced prehistoric stone tool-making processes. But can complex bamboo tools even be made with simple stone tools? A new study suggests the “bamboo hypothesis” is more complicated than conceived, says SMU archaeologist Metin I. Eren. [Source: Kathleen Tibbetts, Southern Methodist University (SMU), April 12, 2011 |::|]

Denisovan spread and evolution

“Researchers know that simple flaked “cobble” industries existed in some parts of the vast East and Southeast Asia region, which includes present-day China, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, parts of Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, East Timor and Vietnam. Stone tool discoveries there have been limited to a few hand axes, cleavers and choppers flaked on one side, however, indicating a lack of more advanced stone tool-making processes, innovation and diversity found elsewhere, say the authors.

“The lack of complex prehistoric stone tool technologies has remained a mystery. Some researchers have concluded that prehistoric people in East Asia must have instead crafted and used tools made of bamboo — a resource that was readily available to them. Scientists have hypothesized various explanations for the lack of complex stone tools in East and Southeast Asia. On one hand, it’s been suggested that human ancestors during the early Stone Age left Africa with rudimentary tools and were then cut-off culturally once they reached East Asia, creating a cultural backwater. Others have suggested a lack of appropriate stone raw materials in East and Southeast Asia. In the new study, however, Bar-Yosef, Eren and colleagues showed otherwise by demonstrating that more complex stone tools could be manufactured on stone perceived to be “poor” in quality.

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Last updated April 2024