CANBERRA, July 20 (Bernama/Xinhua) — Researchers have found evidence of human habitation in Indonesia more than 40,000 years ago, which they say could shed new light on early migration in the region, Xinhua reported.
In a new study, researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) have found evidence of human occupation dating back 42,000 years, including pottery shards and bones, in the Tanimbar Islands (also known as Timur Laut) in southeastern Indonesia.
Lead study author Hendri Kahaluddin, a PhD student at the Australian National University, said the find provided new insights into the migration routes taken by some of the first humans to arrive in the region.
The Tanimbar Islands are located in the Arafura Sea, east of Timor Island, west of New Guinea and north of Australia. The islands lie off the Sahul continental shelf that surrounds Australia and New Guinea.
Kaharuddin said an intriguing question was whether early humans arrived in the region from Southeast Asia, as that would have required advanced navigational skills.
“There are two main routes that have been considered as possibilities since the mid-20th century: a northern route through islands such as Sulawesi, and a southern route near Timor and the Tanimbar islands,” he said in a media release on Saturday.
“This discovery represents one of the oldest sites on the southern route and is an important piece of the puzzle.”
The study, conducted in collaboration with Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency, suggests that early settlers had developed advanced maritime technologies that allowed them to cross bodies of water more than 100 kilometres (62 miles) ago.
Kaharuddin said it was clear that the migration onto the Sahul Shelf occurred as successive waves of marine populations, rather than one big event.
— Bernama/Xinhua News Agency
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