Evidence humans were on Flores a million years ago
Updated
Scientists on the Indonesian Island of Flores have discovered evidence that early humans were living there at least one million years ago. An archaelogical dig has discovered stone tools that has pushed back the age that hominins were living on the island by more than one hundred thousand years ago. Now scientists are speculating that this mystery human may have evolved into the now famous hobbit of Flores.
Presenter: David Mark
Speakers: Dr Adam Brumm research fellow at the Centre for Archaeological Science at the University of Wollongong
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DAVID MARK: Just how long have humans been living on Australia's doorstep?
Dr Adam Brumm is a research fellow at the Centre for Archaeological Science at the University of Wollongong.
ADAM BRUMM: We've found a site in the Soa Basin of Flores, which is in central Flores, which back-dates the known occupation of early humans on the island by at least 120,000 years.
DAVID MARK: Dr Brumm and his colleagues have dug up some primitive stone tools.
ADAM BRUMM: The stone tools are in a deposit that are sealed by volcanic layers like you know ash, that are dated by the argon-argon dating technique to one million years ago.
DAVID MARK: Or even longer.
ADAM BRUMM: We can't go down any deeper so we now have absolutely no idea how long the hominids may have been on the island for. It could be two million years for all we know.
DAVID MARK: Dr Brumm says the finding gives some credence to a theory that it was this mystery hominin that gave rise to the tiny human species that lived on Flores 18,000, homo floresiensis, better known as the hobbit.
ADAM BRUMM: Recent studies based on certain characteristics of the feet, the brain, the skull and the hand and the arm and the shoulders of the hobbit are actually suggesting that it may well have evolved from a much earlier and a much more primitive human population then homo erectus.
And one postulation is in fact that this proposed new species may well have radiated out of Africa and reached south east Asia as early as 1.8 to two million years ago. So the door is certainly open to the possibility that this sort of unknown and mysterious new lineage of hominids may well have been present somewhere in south east Asia and potentially on Flores at a extraordinarily early point in time.
DAVID MARK: And who knows what else may turn up, as Dr Brumm and his colleagues widen their search for our ancestors.
ADAM BRUMM: There are 17,000 islands across Indonesia and we know that they must have been through this area. We're literally dealing this with a pin prick or a glimmer of insight into what potentially could be out there. So I mean it is just mind boggling to think of what new discoveries may be made in south east Asia over the next 50 years or so and what more we will be learning about the evolution of our um, of our kind.
