EARLY PEOPLE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
world's oldest known fish hooks (20,000 years old), from East Timor
The stone-age technology of the first modern humans in Southeast Asia remained little changed until a new Neolithic culture evolved about 10,000 years ago. Stone tools discovered in Houaphanh and Luang Prabang provinces in Laos attest to the presence of prehistoric man in the hunter-gatherer stage in Lao territory from at least 40,000 years ago. The Hoabinhian culture is named after an archaeological site in northern Vietnam. Hoabinhian hunter-gatherers spread throughout much of Southeast Asia, including Laos. Their descendants produced the first pottery in the region, and later bronze metallurgy. In time they supplemented their hunting, fishing and gathering by horticulture and eventually rice cultivation, introduced down the Mekong River valley from southern China.
Evidence of human habitation, estimated at around 33,000 years old, has been found at Golo and Wetef Island (northwest of New Guinea), coastal Sulawesi (Indonesia), the northern coast of New Guinea, the Bismark Archipelago (northeast of New Guinea), and the northern Solomon Islands (southeast of New Guinea),
Land ridges existed as late as 20,000 years, when seas levels were 120 to 130 meters lower than they are now. Some scholars have speculated that flood myths, common among many Southeast Asian minorities, as well as in the Bible, may have originated in Southeast Asia and refer to flooding caused by rising seas after the Ice Age. Most well-known early Neolithic sites in Southeast Asia are in protected caves. Many good sites are believed to date back to the ice age and are now underwater. [Book: “The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia “ by Stephen Oppenheimer (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1999)]
The first people to inhabit Southeast Asia, anthropologists believe, were dark-skinned, curly-haired hunter-gatherers similar to people found in New Guinea, the Solomon Islands Australia and Melanesia. They were late displaced by Chinese. The only survivors of the original hunter gathers that inhabited Southeast Asia are Semang Negritos of peninsular Malaysia and the Negritos of the mountains of Luzon and some islands of the Philippines.
Determining the Diet of Modern Humans Living Laos
According to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology: Although there has been evidence of our species living in rainforest regions in Southeast Asia from at least 70,000 years ago, the poor preservation of organic material in these regions limits how much we know about their diet and ecological adaptations to these habitats. An international team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz has now applied a new method to investigate the diet of fossil humans: the analysis of stable zinc isotopes from tooth enamel. This method proves particularly helpful to learn whether prehistoric humans and animals were primarily eating meat or plants. [Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, October 14, 2021]
Did earliest humans in Southeast Asia eat macaques
In this study, researchers analysed the zinc stable isotope ratios from animal and human teeth from two sites in the Huà Pan Province of Laos: Tam Pà Ling and the nearby site of Nam Lot. “The site of Tam Pà Ling is particularly important for palaeoanthropology and archaeology of Southeast Asia because it holds the oldest and most abundant fossil record of our species in this region”, explains Fabrice Demeter, researcher at the University of Copenhagen. However, there is little archaeological evidence, like stone tools, hearth features, plant remains, cut marks on bones, in Tam Pà Ling: only teeth and bones. This makes isotopic approaches the only way to gain insight into past dietary reliance.
Nitrogen isotope analysis, in particular, can help scientists learn if past humans were eating animals or plants. However, the collagen in bones and teeth needed to do these analyses is not easily conservable. In tropical regions like the one at Tam Pà Ling this problem is even more acute. “New methods – such as zinc isotope analysis of enamel – can now overcome these limitations and allow us to investigate teeth from regions and periods we could not study before”, says study leader Thomas Tütken, professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University’s Institute of Geosciences. “With zinc stable isotope ratios, we can now study Tam Pà Ling and learn what kind of food our earliest ancestors in this region were eating.”
The fossil human studied in this research dates from the Late Pleistocene, more precisely from 46,000 to 63,000 years ago. With it, various mammals from both sites, including water buffalos, rhinos, wild boars, deer, bears, orangutans, macaques, and leopards, were also analysed. All these different animals show various eating behaviours, making for an ideal background to determine what exactly humans were eating at the time. The more diverse the animal remains found at a particular site are, the more information the researchers can use to understand the diet of prehistoric humans.
When we compare the zinc isotope values from the fossil Homo sapiens of Tam Pà Ling to that of the animals, it strongly suggests that its diet contained both plants and animals. This omnivorous diet also differs from most nitrogen isotope data of humans in other regions of the world for that time period, where a meat-rich diet is almost consistently discerned. “Another kind of analysis performed in this study – stable carbon isotopes analysis – indicates that the food consumed came strictly from forested environments”, says Élise Dufour, researcher at the National Natural History Museum of Paris. “The results are the oldest direct evidence for subsistence strategies for Late Pleistocene humans in tropical rainforests.”
Researchers often associated our species with open environments, like savannahs or cold steppes. However, this study shows that early Homo sapienscould adapt to different environments. Together, the zinc and carbon isotope results may suggest a mix of specialized adaptations to tropical rainforests seen from other Southeast Asian archaeological sites. “It will be interesting, in the future, to compare our zinc isotope data with data from other prehistoric human species of Southeast Asia, like Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis, and see if we could understand better why they went extinct while our species survived”, concludes first author Nicolas Bourgon, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
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 |::|]
perhaps prehistoric humans used bamboo tools like this
“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.
“Research until now has failed to address a fundamental question: Is it even possible to make complex bamboo tools with simple stone tools? Now an experimental archaeological study – in which a modern-day flint knapper replicated the crafting of bamboo knives – confirms that it is possible to make a variety of bamboo tools with the simplest stone tools. However, rather than confirming the long-held “bamboo hypothesis,” the new research shows there’s more to the theory, says Eren, the expert knapper who crafted the tools for the study.
Researchers, led by archaeologist and lead author Ofer Bar-Yosef, professor of Stone Age archaeology at Harvard University, found that crudely knapped stone choppers made from round rock “cobbles” performed remarkably well for chopping down bamboo. In addition, bamboo knives were efficiently crafted with stone tools. While the knives easily cut meat, they weren’t effective at cutting animal hides, however, possibly discouraging their use during the Stone Age, say the authors. Some knives made from a softer bamboo species entirely failed to produce and hold a sharp edge. |::|
Replicating Bamboo Tools
“The researchers gathered different kinds of cobble-sized rocks along the banks of the Li, Wu and Xiao Shui rivers, similar to those that would have been available to prehistoric human ancestors. From those rocks, Eren easily replicated flake tools and stone choppers, some of them flaked on one side and some flaked on two sides. The team then observed a local bamboo toolmaker — who used metal tools to easily slice the bamboo — to learn techniques for sawing, shaving, splitting, peeling and chopping bamboo.
Using the crudely knapped stone choppers, the researchers in 84 minutes chopped down 14 bamboo stalks representing five species. When cut, the stalks, both small and large in diameter, totaled more than 65 meters in length. The stone tools performed remarkably well for that purpose, the authors write. That was especially true, they said, considering the tools were wielded by two modern people who were inexperienced with chopping bamboo, researchers Eren and Li. But Eren sometimes found himself scrambling up trees to release felled bamboo wedged in branches. After numerous trials, the researchers developed a simple “bamboo knife reduction sequence” that could produce 20 sharp, durable bamboo knives in about five hours. Using pork purchased from a local market, the researchers write, they found that the knives easily cut meat, but not hide.
“In other findings, the authors write that with a simple stone unifacial chopper, Bar-Yosef was able in 30 minutes to easily make a sharp spear that would have been capable of killing an animal. Also, using the replicated stone tools they were able to produce strips of bamboo thin enough for weaving baskets. “For some items, like baskets, bamboo might have been an ideal raw material,” Eren said. “But one is left to wonder, at least for butchery tasks, why a prehistoric person would go to the trouble of producing a bamboo knife when a stone flake would certainly do the trick,” the authors
Evidence of 39,000-Year-Old Bamboo Tools Found in Tabon Caves, The Philippines
evidence of using a stone tool to make a bamboo tool at Tabon Caves
In 2023, Archaeology magazine and Popular Science reported: It’s difficult to ascertain how long humans have used plant materials to make textiles, ropes, and baskets since these objects rarely survive in archaeological contexts, particularly in the world’s tropical regions, where warm and humid air breaks down green matter easier than stone or bone fragments.. However, microscopic imaging of three 39,000-year-old stone tools from the Tabon Caves identified plant residues and wear patterns likely caused when hard bamboo or palm stalks were stripped into pliable fibers that were easier to weave or tie. This is by far the earliest known evidence of people manipulating plants in Southeast Asia. These findings were described in a study published June 30, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. [Source: Laura Baisas, Popular Science, July 1, 2023; Archaeology magazine, September-October 2023]
Laura Baisas wrote in Popular Science: A team of researchers found these tools in Tabon Cave. Using radiocarbon dating they found these tools were as old as 39,000 years, pushing back the timeline of Southeast Asia’s fiber technology. Previously, the oldest evidence of plant goods in the area were roughly 8,000 year old fragments of mats found in southern China. Compared to the toolkits found from prehistoric groups in Africa or Europe, stone tools in Southeast Asia were not very standardized, using diverse sizes and shapes. According to study co-author Hermine Xhauflair, a prehistorian and ethnoarchaeologist at the University of the Philippines Diliman, some scientists believe that this difference was due to adaptations to the environment that spurred an “Age of Bamboo.” Similar to the Stone Age or Bronze Age, which heavily relied on their namesake materials, tools at this time were likely mostly made of plentiful bamboo. This organic material doesn’t preserve well, so scientists must look for micro-traces for evidence of this critical chapter in human history.“Mastering fiber technology was a very important step in human development,” Xhauflair tells PopSci. “It means that people had the potential and the capacity to make objects from multiple parts, bound by fiber; they could build complex houses and structures, make baskets and traps, string bows to hunt, rig sails to boats, and even build the boats.”
The stone tools that Xhauflair and her team found in Tabon Cave show microscopic evidence of the wear and tear associated with fiber technology. They looked at the plant processing techniques still used by the region’s Indigenous communities, including the Tagbanua, Palaw’an, Tao’t Bato, Molbog, Batak, Agutaynen, and Cuyonon. Rough and rugged plants such as palm and bamboo are stripped and their stems are turned into supple fibers for weaving or tying. Building from these contemporary practices, the team conducted multiple surveys and fieldwork in the rainforest near the cave to find the signature of the different plants and fiber technologies. From that, they could build a database. They then used optical, digital, and scanning electron microscopes on the stone tools from Tabon Cave and found consistent patterns of damage to the stone tools and the ones used today.
Further study will shed light on how the ancient residents of Tabon Cave made baskets, traps, ropes for houses, bows for hunting, and more. This discovery also raises the question of whether plant-based techniques have persisted, uninterrupted, for hundreds of generations. “The technique used nowadays to process plant fibers in the region was already known 39,000 years ago. Are we in [the] presence of a very long-lasting tradition?” Xhauflair asks. “Or was this technique discovered at several points in time and abandoned?”
Pollen Shows How Prehistoric Humans Shaped Forests in Southeast Asia
A study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2014 reported that pollen samples extracted from tropical forests in southeast Asia suggested that early humans there shaped their landscapes as far back as 11,000 years ago —around the end of the last Ice Age. Scientists previously believed the forests were virtually untouched by people but their research revealed signs of imported seeds, plants cultivated for food, and land clearing. The study, led by paleoecologist Chris Hunt, of Queen’s University, Belfast, analyzed existing data and examined samples from Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Thailand and Vietnam. [Source: Josie Garthwaite, Smithsonian magazine, March 5, 2014]
It is believed prehistoric people used bamboo to make things like this fish trap from Yunnan, China
In tropical environments were most organic material decays and disappears pollen can survive for thousands of years under the right conditions and creative a narrative about vegetation over time. Josie Garthwaite wrote in Smithsonian magazine: ““In the Kelabit Highlands of Borneo, for example, pollen samples dated to about 6,500 years ago contain abundant charcoal evidence of fire. That alone doesn’t reveal a human hand. But scientists know that specific weeds and trees that flourish in charred ground would typically emerge in the wake of naturally occurring or accidental blazes. What Hunt’s team found instead was evidence of fruit trees. “This indicates that the people who inhabited the land intentionally cleared it of forest vegetation and planted sources of food in its place,” Hunt explained in a statement about the study.
“Hunt’s team also looked at the types of pollen reported in cores extracted from very isolated areas where, in all likelihood, humans did not intervene with the succession of plants that would have come about simply because of changes in temperature, rainfall, and competition among species. The patterns in these cores could then be used as a proxy for what to expect without human intervention. When layers sampled from other, comparable sites in the region failed match up, it raised a flag for the researchers that humans may have disrupted the natural succession through burning, cultivation, or other activities.
“Ever since people had the ability to make stone tools and control fire, they were able to manipulate the environment,” explained biologist David Lentz, who directs the Center for Field Studies at the University of Cincinnati. “In pre-agricultural times, they would burn forest to improve hunting and increase the growth of plants that were edible—often weedy plants with lots of seeds. This is a pattern that we see all over the world.” It’s not surprising, he added, to see it documented in Southeast Asia. And yet, Hunt said, “It has long been believed that the rainforests of the Far East were virgin wildernesses, where human impact has been minimal.” To the contrary, his team traced signs of vegetation changes resulting from human actions. “While it could be tempting to blame these disturbances on climate change,” he said, “that is not the case as they do not coincide with any known periods of climate change.
Early Humans Were Skilled Deep-Sea Fishermen 42,000 Years Ago
More than 40,000 years ago, prehistoric humans living in what is now East Timor ago possessed the skills necessary to catch deep ocean fish such as tuna. Discovery News reported: “In a small cave at the eastern end of East Timor, north of Australia, archaeologist Sue O’Connor from the Australian National University has unearthed the bones of more than 2,800 fish, some of which were caught as long as 42,000 years ago. [Source: Discovery News, November 28, 2011 |^|]
using bamboo to weave baskets, perhaps like prehistoric humans did
“The find shows that the people living in the region had the sophisticated cognitive skills needed to haul in such a difficult catch, O’Connor says. Her findings appeared in the journal Science. “What the site has shown us is that early modern humans in island Southeast Asia had amazingly advanced maritime skills,” she said. “They were expert at catching the types of fish that would be challenging even today — fish like tuna. It’s a very exciting find.” |^|
“It isn’t clear exactly what techniques the people living in the area at the time used to catch these fish. Tuna can be caught using nets or by trolling hooks on long lines through the water, O’Connor said. “Either way it seems certain that these people were using quite sophisticated technology and watercraft to fish offshore. She said it also demonstrated prehistoric man had high-level maritime skills, and by implication, the technology needed to make the ocean crossings to reach Australia.|^|
“The site where the discoveries were made, known as Jerimalai cave, is a small rock overhang hidden behind in foliage, a few hundred meters from the shore. “When I discovered it in 2005, I didn’t think that Jerimalai would tell us about the very early occupation of Timor,” O’Connor said. “I was quite surprised when I found all these fish bones and turtle bones.” So far, she and her colleagues have only excavated two small test pits at the cave, which contained a number of stone artifacts, bone points, animal remains, shell beads and fish hooks. In just one of those pits, 1 meter square and 2 meters deep, they found 39,000 fish bones. . “I think Jerimalai gives us a window into what maritime coastal occupation was like 40,000 to 50,000 years ago that we don’t really have anywhere else in the world,” said O’Connor. |^|
O’Connor said: “They were expert at catching the types of fish that would be challenging even today - fish like tuna. It's a very exciting find. Simple fish aggregating devices such as tethered logs can also be used to attract them. So they may have been caught using hooks or nets,' she said. 'Either way it seems certain that these people were using quite sophisticated technology and watercraft to fish offshore.” [Source: Simon Tomlinson, Daily Mail, November 25, 2011]
See Separate Article: HISTORY OF FISHING: IN THE PREHISTORIC, ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL AND MODERN ERAS factsanddetails.com
World’s Oldest Fish Hooks Also Found in East Timor and Indonesia
O’Conner’s team also unearthed another rare find — a small piece of fishing hook made from a shell, which dates to between 23,000 and 16,000 years ago. This is the earliest example of a fishing hook that has ever been found, the researchers say. [Source: Discovery News, November 28, 2011 |^|]
Nikhil Swaminathan wrote in Archaeology magazine: “Two 11-square-foot pits dug in Jerimalai Cave on the east end of East Timor have provided some of the earliest evidence of fishing technology. Though there is little evidence of fishing activity beyond 10,000 years ago, fragments of fish hooks found in the cave date to between 16,000 and 23,000 years ago, making them the oldest ever recovered. A more complete hook dating to 11,000 years ago was also found at the site. [Source: Nikhil Swaminathan, Archaeology, Volume 65 Number 2, March/April 2012 ]
“The inch-long hooks, all of which were made of shells from sea snails, would have been used to catch shallow-water fish, such as grouper and snapper, says Sue O'Connor, an archaeologist at Australian National University, who coauthored a study on the finds in Science. "They would have had a fiber line attached to the shank, and bait put on the hook," she explains. "Then, they would be cast or lowered into the water and left stationary."
“Fish bones were also found in the deposits. Offshore species, such as tuna, account for nearly 50 percent of the remains dating to earlier than 7000 B.C. After that, shallow-water and reef species start to dominate, likely due to warmer climate and the proliferation of reef habitat. The variety of the bones depicts the humans of the time as skilled seafarers capable of fishing many species in both shallow and deep water.”
In 2018, Archaeology magazine reported: “In a rock shelter on Indonesia’s Alor Island, just north of Timor, archaeologists have discovered five fishhooks buried with a person who died around 12,000 years ago. The hooks, made from sea snail shells, were placed under the chin and around the jaw. It is rare to uncover burials from this period that include grave goods of any type, and this is the oldest known instance of a burial with fishhooks to have been found anywhere in the world. The researchers believe the deceased was a woman based on the slenderness of the cranium, though they cannot be completely sure as they have not yet excavated the pelvis. “Given how rare grave goods are from the time,” says Sue O’Connor of Australian National University, “that this woman of mature age was buried with a cache of fishhooks suggests that she was a fisherperson of some renown or prestige.” Four of the five hooks are of the circular rotating style thought to have been used for deep-sea fishing, which has traditionally been seen as the province of men. [Source: Daniel Weiss, Archaeology magazine, March-April 2018]
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons, Tabon Man, bamboo tools from the Palawan News
Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Global Viewpoint (Christian Science Monitor), Foreign Policy, Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, NBC News, Fox News and various books and other publications.
Last updated April 2024