Archaeologists have discovered on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, old stone tools up to 1.5 million years, a sign that an unknown archaic human species would have reached the region long before the emergence of modern man.
An international team of researchers announced the discovery of stone tools dated between 1.04 and 1.48 million years in the Indonesian Island Sulawesi, according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature magazine. The artifacts would have been created by an archaic human species, still unknown, which arrived in the region hundreds of thousands of years before the Homo Sapiens species appeared.
The tools – seven in number – were made of creams by rudimentary carving techniques and have repeated use indications. According to the researchers, they would have served to cut, scrape or process the plant materials.
The oldest human trace previously known on Sulawesi was a fragment of upper jaw dated at only 25,000 years old, and the oldest stone tools previously discovered on the island were about 194,000 years.
The authors of the study say they cannot identify exactly what species these tools produced, but it may have been homo erectus or a species close to Homo Floresiensis, nicknamed “Hobbit”.
The discovery rewrites the calendar of the human presence in Wallacea and suggests much earlier and complex migrations in this region than it was believed to.
