A team working inside the archaeological treasure that is the Leang Bulu Bettue cave
Mysterious human-like creatures shared a cave on an Indonesian island with humans.
An eight-meter-deep excavation in Indonesia revealed that humans and a species of hominid that predates humans used the same cave.
But the conclusions of the study did not end there: there is the possibility that both species have overlapped, sharing space at the same time.
As New Atlas details, located approximately in the middle of the Indonesian archipelago, the island of Sulawesi is the fourth largest in the country and the 11th largest in the world. This also makes it the largest landmass between mainland Southeast Asia and a region known as Sahul, which consists of New Guinea and Australia. This has made it a valuable treasure for archaeologists investigating the past to unravel evolutionary enigmas.
No sul de Sulawesi, a grusto it has attracted the interest of scientists who have been excavating it since 2013. In 2023, a team of researchers completed an excavation that reached a depth of around eight meters.
This allowed them to go back in time approximately 200,000 years. In a recent study in the journal PLOS ONE, a team of researchers led by scientists from Griffith University in Australia found evidence of a Dramatic change in the archaeological record around 40,000 years ago.
Before that period, excavation revealed tools used by what the team concluded was a currently extinct hominin species.
The primitive utensils are known as pebble and chip tools, detailed in a release Wednesday, in which river stones, or pebbles, are chipped to form usable tools, including pickaxe-like objects.
The researchers also found monkey bones in the same layers as these tools. This is significant because tracking and capturing an intelligent, agile and fast animal like a monkey would have required hunting skills advanced features that are not normally attributed to the first hominids.
Although scientists have not been able to find fossils of this species, they put forward some possibilities: including Homo erectus, Denisovansa dwarf relative of The man stood upor some hominid not yet identified.
Until humans arrived
What has become clear to scientists is that, around 40,000 years ago, humans arrived and profoundly changed the landscape.
Discoveries supporting the arrival of humans on the island include jewelry, portable stone slab art, more advanced stone tools, and a change in the types of animals that were butchered and consumed.
