The seven stone tools were found at an Early Pleistocene (Ice Age) site called Calio in southern Sulawesi.
New tool discoveries show that early humans crossed a major deep-sea barrier to reach the Indonesia n island of Sulawesi much earlier than previously thought. Researchers from Griffith University and Indonesia ’s National Research and Innovation Agency have found stone tool s dating back at least 1.
04 million years.The seven stone tools were found at an Early Pleistocene site called Calio in southern Sulawesi. The tools were dug up from a sandstone layer within a present-day cornfield.Stone tools were excavated from Calio. The scale bars are 10 mm. M.W. Moore/University of New EnglandCalio artifactsThe Calio artifacts are small, sharp flakes, the kind of tools early humans would have used for tasks like butchering animals or processing plants. The cornfield location would have been a very different place in the Early Pleistocene – a landscape near a river, where these early tool-makers likely hunted and carried out their daily activities. Through advanced dating techniques, including palaeomagnetic analysis of the sandstone and direct dating of a nearby pig fossil, the researchers were able to confidently place the age of these tools at over 1.04 million years old.Previous research had already established a long history of hominin presence in the Wallacean archipelago, which is the island region between Asia and Australia.It is suggested that the hominins who made these tools must have been capable of a sea crossing.The earlier study had uncovered stone tools on the island of Flores at a site called Wolo Sege, which provided evidence of hominin occupation from at least 1.02 million years ago.Furthermore, archaeological evidence at the Talepu site on Sulawesi showed that hominins were present there roughly 194,000 years ago. But the new discovery at Calio pushes that timeline for the island itself back dramatically.“This discovery adds to our understanding of the movement of extinct humans across the Wallace Line, a transitional zone beyond which unique and often quite peculiar animal species evolved in isolation,” said Professor Adam Brumm, who led the study.“It’s a significant piece of the puzzle, but the Calio site has yet to yield any hominin fossils; so while we now know there were tool-makers on Sulawesi a million years ago, their identity remains a mystery,” Brumm added.Were they Homo erectus, the species previously suspected of island hopping in this region? Or could it have been another early human ancestor?Mystery tool makersProfessor Brumm’s team had previously discovered the tiny Homo floresiensis on the island of Flores.This led them to believe that a larger ancestor, possibly Homo erectus, had crossed the sea to reach Flores and, over a very long time, evolved into a smaller form due to a process called island dwarfism.Now, the Sulawesi discovery raises even more intriguing questions. Sulawesi is a much larger and more ecologically diverse island than Flores. What happened to hominins who arrived here a million years ago? “Sulawesi is a wild card – it’s like a mini-continent in itself,” Brumm said.The author added, “If hominins were cut off on this huge and ecologically rich island for a million years, would they have undergone the same evolutionary changes as the Flores hobbits? Or would something totally different have happened?”The finding of million-year-old stone tools on Sulawesi is a major new development in the story of early human evolution. Although we don’t know who made the tools, the discovery shows how adaptable and clever our ancient ancestors were.The study was published in the journal Nature.
Early Pleistocene Energy &Amp Environment Homo Floresiensis Indonesia Stone Tool Sulawesi
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