Cosmos

Ancient teeth rewrite Asian human history

Fresh dating evidence pushes back Homo sapiens arrival in Indonesia by 20,000 years.

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Fossil teeth collected from a cave in West Sumatra indicate that anatomical­ly modern humans were living on southeast Asian islands about 20,000 years earlier than previously thought.

The finding, published in the journal Nature in July, has ramificati­ons in a number of significan­t areas.

The teeth, retrieved from a cave named Lida Ajer, provide the earliest evidence of modern humans living in a rainforest – an environmen­t known to be extremely challengin­g for incoming Homo sapiens, who were adapted to open grassland survival. Just as significan­tly, the dating of human settlement in the region to between 73,000 and 63,000 years ago bolsters the evidence for an earlier settlement of Australia, by at least 5,000 years.

Research published in Nature only weeks earlier show that modern humans were living at Madjedbebe, a site in Australia’s Northern Territory, 65,000 years ago (see opposite page).

Until the Lida Ajer findings – made by a team headed by Kira Westaway from Macquarie University in New South Wales – evidence of human presence in southeast Asia, through which the ancestors of the first Australian­s must have travelled, could not be establishe­d before 60,000 years ago.

The teeth at the centre of the new research – an incisor and a molar – were first discovered by Dutch paleoanthr­opologist and explorer Eugene Dubois in the late 19th century.

Poorly documented, they remained unstudied until Westaway and her colleagues rediscover­ed the cave in which they were found (using Dubois’ original notebook) and establishe­d a firm age range for the soil layers in which they were lodged, using luminescen­ce and uraniumtho­rium dating methods.

Meet Kira Westaway, scuba diver turned ancient hominin expert, page 85.

 ??  ?? CREDIT: MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY Kira Westaway, pulling teeth in Sumatra.
CREDIT: MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY Kira Westaway, pulling teeth in Sumatra.

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