Sulawesi has some of the world’s oldest cave art, but ancient human remains have been scarce — now a fossil with DNA hints at a mysterious lineage of people.
Sulawesi has some of the world’s oldest cave art, but ancient human remains have been scarce — now a fossil with DNA hints at a mysterious lineage of people.
The 7,000-year-old skeleton of a teenage hunter-gatherer from Sulawesi in Indonesia could be the first remains found from a mysterious, ancient culture known as the Toaleans, researchers report this week in Nature1.
The largely complete fossil of a roughly 18-year-old Stone Age woman was found in 2015 buried in a fetal position in a limestone cave on Sulawesi. The island is part of a region known as Wallacea, which forms the central islands of the Indonesian archipelago.
DNA extracted from the skull suggests the woman shared ancestry with New Guineans and Aboriginal Australians, as well with an extinct species of ancient human.
“This is the first time anyone’s found ancient human DNA in that region,” says Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University in Brisbane, who is part of a team that described the find.
The authors say she may be one of the Toalean people, whose existence is known from scant archaeological evidence, such as distinctively notched stone tools, and who were thought to have lived in Sulawesi at around the same time.
Gateway to Australasia
The remains were found alongside Toalean-type tools, providing strong evidence of the woman’s link to these little-known people, agrees Shimona Kealy, an archaeologist at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Wallacea is the gateway through which ancestors of modern Papuan and Aboriginal Australians travelled, but very few ancient human remains have been discovered there. One of the most famous is the diminutive ‘Hobbit’ skeleton of the early human species Homo floresiensis, which was found on the island of Flores, south of Sulawesi.
The hot, moist tropical environment means DNA degrades rapidly in fossils, making genetic material a rare prize for researchers working in the region. The authors suspect that the skeleton’s burial inside the Leang Panninge limestone cave might have helped to preserve enough DNA for analysis.
Adding genomic analysis to archaeological evidence “provides much more insight into the early population movements and genetic diversity of people in that region”, Brumm says.
Kealy says the simple fact that DNA has been extracted from a fossil in this challenging environment for DNA preservation is a key achievement of the project. “To see these guys get enough of a sequence that they can actually do analysis on it — and from something that’s 7,000 years old, which is quite impressive — that’s the real excitement,” she adds.
