For the first time, DNA has been obtained from the bones of a Stone Age person who lived on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The genetic information sheds light on the prehistory of the South-East Asian islands – including what happened when our species, Homo sapiens, first reached the area.
Sulawesi is one of the largest islands in South-East Asia, the region between the Asian mainland and Australia. On the island’s South Peninsula, researchers have excavated a cave called Leang Panninge. There, they found the buried remains of a young woman. She was about 17 years old when she died, about 7200 years ago.
The woman belonged to a Stone Age hunter-gatherer culture known to archaeologists as the Toaleans. “They made this very distinctive culture with very sophisticated types of stone tools, these beautiful little arrowheads with toothlike serrations along the edges,” says at Griffith University in Australia.
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The only evidence of these people is from Sulawesi’s South Peninsula, from between about 8000 years ago and 1500 years ago. “This is the first skeletal remains of a Toalean woman,” says Brumm. He and his colleagues sent one bone for DNA extraction. They didn’t expect to get anything, because Sulawesi has a hot and wet climate, which degrades DNA rapidly. But to their surprise the bone did yield DNA – albeit badly degraded. “I guess we just got lucky,” says Brumm.
The woman’s DNA was most similar to that of modern Aboriginal Australians and Papuans. The simplest explanation is that she is descended from the first wave of modern humans who entered South-East Asian islands from the Asian mainland more than 50,000 years ago. Some of those people travelled all the way to Australia or Papua New Guinea, but others settled in places like Sulawesi – ultimately giving rise to groups like the Toaleans.
The Toalean woman’s DNA isn’t a perfect match for any known modern population, so the Toaleans “seem to have left no descendants as far as we can tell”, says Brumm. But he adds that there is still limited human genetic data from Sulawesi, so it is possible the Toaleans’ descendants have simply not been identified.
About 2.2 per cent of the woman’s DNA came from the Denisovans: a mysterious human group known from a handful of sites in Asia who interbred with modern humans. “It’s now possible that Sulawesi could be where our species encountered and interbred with the Denisovans,” says Brumm.
This has been suggested before, because Denisovan DNA is particularly common in people from Papua New Guinea and the Philippines.
Nature
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