AsianScientist (Jun. 28, 2016) – A new study of the 37,000-year-old remains of Deep Skull, the oldest modern human to have been discovered on a Southeast Asian island, has revealed this ancient person was not related to Indigenous Australians as originally thought. Furthermore, Deep Skull was also likely to have been an older woman, rather than a teenage boy.
The research, led by Associate Professor Darren Curnoe from the University of New South Wales in Australia and published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, represents the most detailed investigation of the ancient cranium since it was found in Niah Cave in Sarawak, Malaysia in 1958.
“Our analysis overturns long-held views about the early history of this region,” said Curnoe, who is the director of the UNSW Palaeontology, Geobiology and Earth Archives Research Center.
“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.”
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 analyzed by prominent British anthropologist Don Brothwell.
In 1960, Brothwell concluded that 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.
Six decades later, the present study shows that 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 from more northerly parts of Southeast Asia today.
The new study also challenges the so-called ‘two-layer’ hypothesis, in which Southeast Asia is thought to have been initially settled by people related to Indigenous Australians and New Guineans, who were then replaced by farmers from southern China a few thousand years ago.
“Our work, coupled with recent genetic studies of people across Southeast Asia, presents a serious challenge to the two-layer scenario for Borneo and islands further to the north,” said Curnoe. “We need to rethink our ideas about the region’s prehistory, which was far more complicated than we’ve appreciated until now.”
According to the present study, in Borneo at least, the earliest people to inhabit the island were much more like Indigenous people living there today rather than Indigenous Australians, and suggests long continuity through time.
It also suggests that at least some of the Indigenous people of Borneo were not replaced by migrating farmers, but instead adopted the new farming culture when it arrived around 3,000 years ago.
The article can be found at: Curnoe et al. (2016) Deep Skull from Niah Cave and the Pleistocene Peopling of Southeast Asia.
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Source: University of New South Wales.
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