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The dispersal of antiquated hominins beyond mainland Southeast Asia (Sunda) represents the earliest proof for people crossing ocean barriers to reach separated landmasses. Formerly, the earliest indicator of hominins in Wallacea, the oceanic island zone east of Sunda, made up flaked stone artifacts transferred a minimum of 1.02 million years back at the website of Wolo Sege on the island of Flores. On Sulawesi, the biggest Wallacean island, previous excavations exposed stone artifacts with a minimum age of 194,000 years at the open website of Talepu. Now, archaeologists from Griffith University reveal that stone artifacts likewise take place at the close-by website of Calio in fossiliferous layers dated to a minimum of 1.04 million years and potentially as much as 1.48 million years. This discovery recommends that Sulawesi was occupied by hominins at around the exact same time as Flores, if not earlier.
Antiquated hominins. Image credit: Ninara/ CC BY 2.0.
Griffith University’s Professor Adam Brumm and his associates excavated an overall of 7 stone artifacts from the sedimentary layers of the Calio website.
In the Early Pleistocene, this would have been the website of hominin tool-making and other activities such as searching, in the area of a river channel.
The Calio artifacts include little, sharp-edged pieces of stones (flakes) that the early human tool-makers struck from bigger pebbles that had actually probably been acquired from neighboring riverbeds.
“This discovery contributes to our understanding of the motion of extinct human beings throughout the Wallace Line, a transitional zone beyond which special and frequently rather strange animal types developed in seclusion,” Professor Brumm stated.
Restoration of Homo floresiensisImage credit: Elisabeth Daynes.
The archaeologists utilized paleomagnetic dating of the sandstone itself and direct-dating of an excavated pig fossil, to validate an age of a minimum of 1.04 million years for the Calio artifacts.
Formerly, they had actually exposed proof for hominin profession in Wallacea from a minimum of 1.02 million years back, based upon the existence of stone tools at Wolo Sege on the island of Flores, and by around 194,000 years earlier at Talepu on Sulawesi.
The island of Luzon in the Philippines, to the north of Wallacea, had actually likewise yielded proof of hominins from around 700,000 years earlier.
“It’s a substantial piece of the puzzle, however the Calio website has yet to yield any hominin fossils,” Professor Brumm stated.
“So while we now understand there were tool-makers on Sulawesi a million years back, their identity stays a secret.”
Stone artifacts from the website of Calio, Sulawesi, Indonesia. Image credit: Hakim et aldoi: 10.1038/ s41586-025-09348-6.
The initial discovery of Homo floresiensis and subsequent 700,000-year-old fossils of a comparable small-bodied hominin on Flores recommended that it might have been Homo erectus that breached the powerful marine barrier in between mainland Southeast Asia to populate this little Wallacean island, and, over numerous countless years, went through island dwarfism.
“The discover on Sulawesi has actually led us to question what may have taken place to Homo erectus on an island more than 12 times the size of Flores?” Teacher Brumm stated.
“Sulawesi is a wild card– it’s like a mini-continent in itself.”
“If hominins were cut off on this substantial and environmentally abundant island for a million years, would they have gone through the exact same evolutionary modifications as the Flores hobbits?”
“Or would something completely various have taken place?”
The research study was released the other day in the journal Nature
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B. Hakim et alHominins on Sulawesi throughout the Early Pleistocene. Naturereleased online August 7, 2025; doi: 10.1038/ s41586-025-09348-6
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