Some stone tools found near a river on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi suggest that the first hominins had reached the islands by at least 1.04 million years ago. That's around the same time that the ancestors of the infamously diminutive “Hobbits” may have reached the island of Flores.
Archaeologist Budianto Hakim of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency and his colleagues were the ones who recently unearthed the tools from a site on Sulawesi. Although a handful of stone flakes from that island don't tell us who the ancestors of the small species were or how they reached remote islands like Flores and Luzon, the tools are one more piece in the puzzle. And this handful of stone flakes may eventually play a role in helping us understand how other hominin species conquered most of the world long before we came along.
Crossing the ocean a million years ago
Sometimes the deep past leaves the smallest traces. At the Calio site, a sandstone outcrop in what's now a cornfield outside the village of Ujung in southern Sulawesi, people left behind just a handful of sharp stone flakes roughly a million years ago. There are seven of them, ranging from 22 to 60 millimeters long, and they're scratched, worn, and chipped from tumbling around at the bottom of a river. But it's still clear that they were once shaped by skilled human—or at least human-like—hands that used hard stones as hammers to make sharp-edged chert flakes for cutting and scraping.
The oldest of these tools is likely to be between 1.04 and 1.48 million years old. Hakim and his colleagues dated teeth from a wild pig to around 1.26 million years ago. They were part of a jawbone archaeologists unearthed from a layer just above the oldest flake. Throw in some statistical modeling, and you get the range of likely dates for the stone flake buried in the deepest layer of soil.
Even the younger end of that estimate would make these tools the oldest evidence yet of hominins (of any species) in the islands of Indonesia and the Philippines. This area, sometimes called Wallacea, lies between the continents of Asia and Australia, separated from both by wide channels of deep ocean.
“But the Calio site has yet to yield any hominin fossils,” said Brumm, “so while we now know there were tool-makers on Sulawesi a million years ago, their identity remains a mystery.” But they may be related to the Hobbits, a short-statured group of hominins who lived hundreds of kilometers away on the island of Flores until around 50,000 years ago.
“The discovery of Early Pleistocene artifacts at Calio suggests that Sulawesi was populated by hominins at around the same time as Flores, if not earlier,” wrote Hakim and his colleagues in their recent paper.
The Flores connection
The islands that now make up Indonesia and the Philippines have been a hominin hotspot for at least a million years. Our species wandered onto the scene sometime between 63,000 and 73,000 years ago, but at least one other hominin species had already been there for at least a million years. We’re just not sure exactly who they were, when they arrived, or how.
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