Indonesian cave reveals earliest evidence of our ancestors

[brooklynite]

Source: Axios

New analysis of fossils found in Indonesia suggests modern humans may have arrived on the island as early as 73,000 years ago and that they were able to develop technologies sooner than previously thought.

What it means: This is the earliest evidence yet of modern humans living in rainforests and supports recent suggestions that they migrated out of Africa earlier than previously thought. It also suggests they were able to colonize inland, where it requires much more planning and technological innovation to grow food and survive the elements, which some researchers thought individuals at the time weren't advanced enough to do.

The team of researchers re-analyzed two human teeth found in a rainforest cave in the late 19th century and concluded they were from anatomically modern humans who had mastered the necessary tools to survive inland. They were able to use surrounding sediment to date the remains to between 73,000 and 63,000 years old.



Read more: https://www.axios.com/earliest-evidence-ancestors-in-rainforests-2470678833.html

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Also suggests seafaring was an accomplishable task.

[underpants]

1. Not me my family came from West Virginia

[Docreed2003]

2. That's fascinating! Thanks!

[left-of-center2012]

3. "as early as 73,000 years ago"

I'm sure Pat Robertson has an explanation for this.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

6. Fake dating is his explanation. All dating systems that register more than 6,000 years ago are fake.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Ah yes, the island of Indonesia. There's only one, you know. Axios told me so.

Jesus, does that website think it will ever be qualified to report international news?

If we follow the link to the Nature letter, we find it's about Sumatra.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature23452.html?foxtrotcallback=true

This means, for instance, that they may not have needed boats to get there from the Asia mainland. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundaland

[Wounded Bear]

11. I believe there may have been land bridges then due to the ice ages...

[procon]

5. Don't tell that con artist scamming people to see his arc and buy

his alternative history novels about humanity's 6,000 year old existence. Changing everything to 73,000 years would really disrupt his spiel (sniff-sniff) and impact his profits.

[Warpy]

7. Seafaring was possible?

You bet it was. "Will it float?" is one of the first games a little kid will play. And if they didn't know what floated and how to put it together to carry them, humanity would have been stopped dead at the first river it came to.

Am I surprised they found such early evidence? Hell, no. One thing that has always defined us as a species is out habit of wandering.

[Wounded Bear]

12. Hell, if you watch a tree branch float down a river...

it doesn't take a lot of imagination to think, "Maybe I can hang onto that and float across."

[Warpy]

14. And not a lot more imagination to lash a few of them together with vines

or sinew and float the whole tribe across.

It's why I find so much CW from anthropology texts infuriating. We're smarter than that and so were they.

[Igel]

17. It's one thing to float across a river.

If the current washes you downstream, oh, well, it washes you downstream. You don't like it, you swim to shore; if that's a problem, you wait until you're near shore and hike back to say you're okay.

Going by boat near the shore is also a reasonably easy thing to do. There's been a persistent debate whether humans left Africa by land, going across the Middle East through Iran and down to India or just followed the coasts. You could use coracles for that, no need to have heavy tools for digging out canoes or clever ways of joining worked timber and pitching it. If you start going out to sea, you paddle in. Avoid all those wide-mouthed rivers, the swamps and marshes, brush, jungles, whatever. And the nasty critters that live there.

It's quite another to just float across an ocean. Even the English Channel can be a bear because if the current's going in the wrong direction your next stop may be the Canaries. Then the problem is getting home to report your discovery or just to send word that you're not dead and it was a really, really stupid thing to try to do. Narrow channels where you can see the other side can be some of the most treacherous waters. Until you have sails or a way to have men with a large enough food supply you're really at the mercy of the currents. And if you see your brother and his family float off and never return, I'm not sure that "they must have gone to a better place" will encourage you to hop on the next log with your wife and kid.

There's a reason Hawaii wasn't settled until probably the early 1200s, New Zealand a bit later yet, and the Chathams centuries later--you generally have to fight the currents to get to them. Even in the new world some dates of first settlement are outrageously late: The Vikings beat the "First Peoples" to much of Greenland, the First Peoples moving in only after the Vikings abandoned their settlements.

[muriel_volestrangler]

18. Doesn't matter, because this was Sumatra, which was connected to the mainland

for significant periods. They could walk there. This is not evidence of seafaring at all.

[Warpy]

19. Yeah, by mangrove swamps.

It was a lot easier to float around them than go through them.

[muriel_volestrangler]

21. You really know the entire strait was never more than mangrove swamp for thousands of years?

That's pretty impressive for an area a few hundred miles long. Link?

[longship]

8. How about Homo Erectus?

Like Java Man, Peking Man, among others.

Homo erectus traveled from Africa to Asia from 1.9 million years ago to about 143,000 years ago. They were amongst the first to use fire.

So these dudes, 73,000 years ago were definitely not the first human ancestors out of Africa.

[Wounded Bear]

13. I'm assuming they mean "modern" man, or homo sapiens...

which only dates back to 100-250k years or so. It wasn't thought they would be in SE Asia that soon, I think.

[Warpy]

15. They've recently dated human occupation in Australia

to 65,000 years ago. So yes. Aborigines are as modern as we are.

[longship]

16. You might be correct, but the reportage here is not very good.

Our ancestors were out of Africa, into Asia, over a million years ago.

You'd think that they'd get the science correct.

[jpak]

9. Our extended family never fails to amaze me

thanks for posting

[StevieM]

10. I wonder how this matches up with the Toba catastrophe theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

[scipan]

20. link to a more reputable source:

That one is full of inaccuracies.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2142952-early-humans-may-have-seen-a-supervolcano-explosion-up-close/
Early humans may have seen a supervolcano explosion up close

Many archaeologists were puzzled by the recent discovery of 65,000-year-old stone tools and other artefacts in northern Australia. According to traditional thinking, early members of our species, Homo sapiens, were just beginning to venture out of Africa at this time.

To get from Africa to Australia, H. sapiens would also have needed to march across mainland Asia, then sail across the sea. The route should have included a stopover on the islands of Indonesia and Timor, but no H. sapiens artefacts older than 45,000 years had been found on these islands, until now.