According to new research, this distinct human lineage has never been found anywhere else in the world.
We have discovered the first ancient human DNA in the island region between Asia and Australia, known as ‘Wallacea’, which provides a new insight into the genetic diversity and population history of the first modern humans in this little-understood part of the world. , ”the study said. co-author Adam Brumm, professor of archeology at the Australian Research Center for Human Evolution at Griffith University, by email.
Early modern humans used the Wallacea Islands, primarily the Indonesian islands that include Sulawesi, Lombok, and Flores, as they crossed from Eurasia to the Australian mainland more than 50,000 years ago, according to researchers. However, the exact route or how they navigated this crossing is unknown.
“They must have done so using relatively sophisticated jet skis, as there were no land bridges between the islands, even during the glacial peaks of the last ice age, when the global sea level was up to 140 meters ( 459 feet) lower than they are today, “Brumm said.
Rock tools and paintings have suggested that humans lived on these islands 47,000 years ago, but fossil record is scarce and ancient DNA degrades more rapidly in tropical climates.
However, researchers discovered the skeleton of a 17- to 18-year-old female in a Sulawesi cave in 2015. Her remains were buried in the cave 7,200 years ago. It was part of the Talawese culture, which is only found in a pocket in the southwestern Sulawesi Peninsula. The cave is part of an archaeological site called Leang Panninge.
“The ‘toaleans’ is the name that archaeologists have given to a rather enigmatic culture of prehistoric hunter-gatherers who lived in the wooded plains and mountains of South Sulawesi about 8,000 years ago until about the 5th century AD.” say Brumm by email. “They made highly distinctive stone tools (including small, finely crafted arrowheads, known as ‘Maros points’) that are not found anywhere else on the island or in wider Indonesia.”
The young hunter-gatherer is the first largely complete and well-preserved skeleton associated with Talawese culture, Brumm said.
The study’s lead author, Selina Carlhoff, was able to retrieve the wedge-shaped petro bone DNA at the base of the skull.
“It was a major challenge, as the wreckage had been severely degraded by the tropical climate,” Carlhoff, also a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, said in a statement. .
Secrets hidden in DNA
The work to retrieve the genetic information was worth it.
The young woman’s DNA showed that she was descended from the first wave of modern humans that entered Wallacea 50,000 years ago. This was part of the initial colonization of “Greater Australia”, or the combined mass of the ice age of Australia and New Guinea. These are the ancestors of today’s Indigenous Australians and Papuans, Brumm said.
And it turns out that the oldest genome in the Wallacea Islands revealed something else: ancient humans unknown until now.
It also shares ancestry with a separate, distinct group from Asia that probably came after the colonization of Greater Australia, as modern Australians and Papuans do not share ancestry with that group, Brumm said.
“Previously, it was thought that the first time people with Asian genes entered Wallacea was about 3,500 years ago, when Dutch-speaking Neolithic Taiwanese farmers swept through the Philippines and came to Indonesia,” he said.
“It suggests that there might be a different group of modern humans in this region that until now we had no idea, as archaeological sites are so scarce in Wallacea and ancient skeletal remains are rare.”
There are no descendants of this lineage.
Their genome included another trace of an enigmatic and extinct human group: the Denisovans. The handful of fossils meaning that these first humans have ever existed come largely from Siberia and Tibet.
“The fact that their genes are found in Leang Panninge hunter-gatherers supports our previous hypothesis that Denisovans occupied a much larger geographic area” than had been previously understood, said the co-author of the study, Johannes Krause, professor of archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute. Evolutionary anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in a statement.
But when his DNA was compared to that of other hunter-gatherers living west of Wallacea at the same time, his DNA contained no trace of Denisovan’s DNA.
“The geographical distribution of Denisovans and modern humans may have overlapped with the Wallacea region. It may be the key place where Denisova people and the ancestors of Australian Indians and Papuans interact,” said the study’s co-author. , Cosimo Posth, professor at the University of The Senckenberg Center for Evolution and the Human Paleoenvironment of Tübingen in Frankfurt, Germany, in a statement.
Researchers do not know what happened to the Talawese culture and this latest discovery is a piece of the puzzle as they try to understand the ancient genetic history of humans in Southeast Asia. Brumm hopes that older DNA from the Taleu people can be recovered to reveal its diversity “and its broader ancestral history.”