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Timor cave may reveal how humans reached Australia Indonesia

Submitted by Andy B on Thursday, 21 December 2006  Page Views: 6742

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Country: Indonesia An Australian archaeologist has discovered the oldest evidence of occupation by modern humans on the islands that were the stepping stones from South-East Asia to Australia. A cave site in East Timor where people lived more than 42,000 years ago, eating turtles, tuna and giant rats, was unearthed by Sue O'Connor, head of archaeology and natural history at the Australian National University.



Dr O'Connor also found ancient stone tools and shells used for decoration in the limestone shelter, known as Jerimalai, on the eastern tip of the island.

She said her discovery could help solve the mystery of the route ancient seafarers took to get here from South-East Asia.

It strengthens the view that they made a southern passage, via Timor, rather than travelling northwards via Borneo and Sulawesi, then down through Papua New Guinea. "The antiquity of the Jerimalai shelter makes this site significant at a world level," said Dr O'Connor, who presented the findings at the annual conference of the Australian Archaeological Association this month.

Sea levels were lower when modern humans set off around the coast from Africa more than 70,000 years ago. People who made it to the large South-East Asian land mass known as Sunda, however, still had to cross deep ocean channels to get to Australia, then joined to Papua New Guinea in a continent called Sahul.

More, with photo: The Age

See also the Sydney Morning Herald
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"Timor cave may reveal how humans reached Australia" | Login/Create an Account | 1 comment
  
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From DNA Analysis, Clues to a Single Australian Migration by coldrum on Tuesday, 22 May 2007
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From DNA Analysis, Clues to a Single Australian Migration

Geneticists re-examining the first settlement of Australia and Papua-New Guinea by modern humans have concluded that the two islands were reached some 50,000 years ago by a single group of people who remained in substantial or total isolation until recent times. The finding, if upheld, would undermine assumptions that there have been subsequent waves of migration into Australia.

Analyzing old and new samples of Aborigine DNA, which are hard to obtain because of governmental restrictions, the geneticists developed a detailed picture of the aborigines’ ancestry, as reflected in their Y chromosomes, found just in men, and their mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element passed down just through the mother.

The results show that Aborigines and the people of Papua-New Guinea share several ancient genetic lineages, indicating that both are descended from a single founding population.

All Australian Aborigines, at least to judge by the genetic samples in hand, are descended from this founding population, meaning that no further immigrants reached Australia in numbers large enough to leave a genetic trace until the modern era.

The findings, by Toomas Kisivild and a group of geneticists and archaeologists situated mostly at the University of Cambridge in England, are reported today in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The oldest human remains from Australia, about 45,000 years in age, have quite thin or gracile bones, whereas fossils from 20,000 years ago are robust. The new findings suggest that the difference must stem from some internal process like adaptation to climatic change, and not to interbreeding with the archaic species Homo erectus, as some have suggested.

The new genetic analysis also undercuts the theory that the dingo, a dog that appeared in Australia 4,000 years ago, arrived with a new wave of settlers. Dr. Kisivild suggested that the dingo could have been an item of trade. But Richard G. Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford University, said new immigrants were more likely to have introduced the dog, even though they were too few to have left a genetic trace.

Dr. Kisivild’s team has also been able to estimate, by counting mutations in DNA, the duration of the emigrants’ journey from India, an early point of settlement outside Africa, to the lost continent of Sahul that then included New Guinea and Australia.

The journey would have taken less than 5,200 years, the geneticists calculate, as a growing population gradually spread along the coastlines of southeastern Asia. The emigrants would have had to cross open sea only at the final stage of their journey.

The genetic estimates for the duration of the journey are “intriguing, but not compelling,” Dr. Klein said. “I think we need lots more archaeological evidence to resolve the question of how long it took modern humans to spread from Africa to Australia or anywhere else.”

The oldest inhabitants of New Guinea, who speak languages of the Papuan family, would have changed under the evolutionary forces of selection and genetic drift. Still, modern Papuan speakers may offer “a pretty good idea of what our ancestors might have looked like coming out of Africa 2,000 generations ago,” said Peter Forster of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, an author of the new report.

Dr. Klein, however, said that aboriginal Australians and Papuans differed in appearance from that expected for the earliest fossil remains in Australia and that their morphology had to have emerged later.

“I don’t think genetics implies that aboriginal Australians and Papuans resemble the original modern African emigrants more closely than anyone else,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/science/08abor.html?ex=1179460800&en=e17adc70e4d2f807&ei=5070
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