Human fossils of a lost world found … on an artificial island
Thanks to the sandblasting business for the creation of an artificial island in Indonesia, fossils from a « lost world » that ended up at the bottom of the sea 140,000 years ago came to light for the first time. Among them, fossils of Homo erectus, the first human species that conquered the world.
Two small sections of Homo erectus skulls were among more than 6,000 fossils of animals found scattered on the sandy surface of the artificial island in the narrow Mandura outside Java. The island consists of 5 million cubic meters of sand and sandstone that was recovered from the seabed to a nearby port.
The fossils belong to 36 species of animals that lived in Sundalan, an area of land that connected mainland Asia with the islands of Jaba, Sumatra and Borneo during the glacier era.
At that time « large areas of the northern hemisphere were covered by glaciers, and the amount of water concentrated in polar ice covers so that the sea level was 100 meters lower than today » he said in press release Harold Bergouis of the University of Liden in the Netherlands, a member of the team that examined the fossils.
The artificial island was created with sand with the seabed (Courtsy of Pelindo)
Homo erectus appeared in Africa about 2 million years ago and soon expanded throughout Eurasia. Our ancestral species disappeared in most of Asia about 350,000 years ago, while other members of the human family such as Neanderthal and Denisovan arrived in Epirus.
On the island of Java, however, Homo Erectus survived up to 117-108 thousand years ago. The new findings now reveal that the population of Java was not isolated as we thought but had expanded to Sundalan.
Fossils
At that time, Sundalan was reminiscent of today’s African savannah, a large Livadopos with river lanes along rivers and rich fauna that included elephants, cattle, rhinos and crocodiles.
Researchers speculate that the Homo erectus traveled along the rivers. « There were water, shells, fish, edible plants, seeds and fruits all year round, » Bergouis said.
The researchers even discovered traces of cutting in bovine and aquatic turtles bones, an indication that the Homo erectus were hunting.
Such practices have not been documented for neighboring Java’s homo erectus, but they are known to have been applied by other human species in Asian inland.
« Homo erectus may have copied the practice of these populations. This indicates that there may have been contact between these groups or even an exchange of genetic material, ”commented Bergouis.
The findings are presented in four individual studies in the Quaternary Environments and Humans, available here; here; here and here.
