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Scientists have found a series of stone tools on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island that they believe could be proof of humans living in the area 1.5 million years ago.
This civilisation would have lived between Asia and Australia, in the Wallacea region. The evidence would make this group the earliest known humans in that region.
A team of archaeologists from Australia and Indonesia found small, chipped tools under the soil in Soppeng in South Sulawesi. The archaeologists believe the ancient humans used the tools to cut small animals and carve rocks.
Radioactive tracing of these tools and the teeth of animals found around the site dates back up to 1.48 million years ago.
The earliest Wallacean humans were prehistoric persons known as Homo erectus. Historians thought this group of ancient humans would have only settled in Indonesia’s Flores Island and the Philippines’ Luzon Island around 1.02 million years ago.
Scientists believed this because they thought the Homo erectus could not travel long distances across seas. But the new findings show that they actually may have travelled across a large ocean path to reach Sulawesi.
