A new study of the 37,000-year old remains of the "Deep Skull" - the oldest modern human discovered in island South-East Asia - has revealed this ancient person was not related to Indigenous Australians, as had been originally thought. The Deep Skull was also likely to have been an older woman, rather than a teenage boy.
The research, led by UNSW Australia Associate Professor Darren Curnoe, represents the most detailed investigation of the ancient cranium specimen since it was found in Niah Cave in Sarawak in 1958.
"Our analysis overturns long-held views about the early history of this region," says Associate Professor Curnoe, Director of the UNSW Palaeontology, Geobiology and Earth Archives Research Centre (PANGEA). "We've found that these very ancient remains most closely resemble some of the Indigenous people of Borneo today, with their delicately built features and small body size, rather than Indigenous people from Australia."
The study, by Curnoe and researchers from the Sarawak Museum Department and Griffith University, is published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
The Deep Skull was discovered by Tom Harrisson of the Sarawak Museum during excavations at the West Mouth of the great Niah Cave complex and was analysed by prominent British anthropologist Don Brothwell. In 1960, Brothwell concluded the Deep Skull belonged to an adolescent male and represented a population of early modern humans closely related, or even ancestral, to Indigenous Australians, particularly Tasmanians.
"Brothwell's ideas have been highly influential and stood largely untested, so we wanted to see whether they might be correct after almost six decades," says Curnoe. "Our study challenges many of these old ideas. It shows the Deep Skull is from a middle-aged female rather than a teenage boy, and has few similarities to Indigenous Australians. Instead, it more closely resembles people today from more northerly parts of South-East Asia."
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"We need to rethink our ideas about the region's prehistory, which was far more complicated than we've appreciated until now."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 30 2016, @03:21AM
What makes this team of scientists confident that this is a woman's skull?
Trying to remember what Desmond Morris wrote about sexual signalling via body parts... picking would be slim from just skull fragments.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 30 2016, @03:37AM
Meh. Everyone knows that the "Out of Africa" theory is bogus. Seafaring was more common than academics initially assumed. The neolithic style Gobekli Tepe [wikipedia.org] find in Turkey considerably rolls back the date of early civilization and migration patterns. Olmec statues in South America appear African in origin.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Thursday June 30 2016, @03:55AM
As Gordon White likes to say, complex human culture started there and they walked along the beach to Southeast Asia.
But even if you don't subscribe to anything as way-out as Atlantis in the South Pacific, Gobekli Tepe is, as they say, a "game changer".
You are still welcome on my lawn.