INDONESIA ISLANDS PROBABLY HAD OTHER EARLY HUMANS BESIDES THE "HOBBIT"

This week in the journal "Nature" there is a picture of a great many stone artifacts that were found lying scattered on a gravelly surface near Talepu on the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi during the first deep excavations at the site in 2009. Scientists have discovered stone-age tools at least 118,000-years-old on an Indonesian island but no trace of the early humans that made them, according to a study recently released.

The research, published in the journal Nature, also points to a possible link with the first peoples to arrive in Australia.

Unearthed at four separate sites on Sulawesi, the trove of several hundred implements is likely to fuel a long-simmering debate about the identity of now-extinct human species that first came to the island chain. In 2003, fossil remains from a diminutive species of hominin—a terms that groups extinct lineages of early man and modern humans—was discovered in the neighboring island of Flores. Dubbed the "Hobbit", Homo floresiensis had arrived there at least a million years earlier, dating tests revealed.

The new find shows "that Flores was not the only island once inhabited by archaic humans before Homo sapiens"—a.k.a. modern man—"got there around 50,000 years ago," says lead author Gerrit van den Bergh, a researcher at the University of Wollongong in Australia.


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-01-stone-age-tools-wielded.html#jCp