Small skulls point to human migration highway to Australia

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on August 26, 2019 / comment : 0 Anthropology, Australasia, Australia, Java, Papua New Guinea, South East Asia

Human remains discovered on Alor island in Indonesia offer new insight into human migration through Southeast Asia thousands of years ago, say researchers from The Australian National University (ANU).

Credit: Samper Carro et al. 2019

Lead researcher Dr. Sofía Samper Carro says the two skulls, dated between 12,000 and 17,000 years old, are the oldest human remains ever found in Wallacea—the islands between Java, Papua New Guinea and Australia.

"Although we were aware that modern humans were in Timor and Sulawesi over 40,000 years ago, these remains are the first fossil evidence of modern human presence in Wallacea," Dr. Samper Carro said. "The area around Alor may have been a sort of 'highway', with people moving through these islands, and finally getting to Australia."

That wasn't the only exciting find.

"What is really interesting is the small size of their heads," Dr. Samper Carro said. "The size seems to be similar to other remains found later in this region, dated to between 7,000—10,000 years old. This is potentially the result of a reduction in size after the first modern humans settled in these islands. This is different to what you find in Australia and other parts of mainland Southeast Asia during the same period, where, in general, humans have larger skulls."

Dr. Samper Carro says one possible explanation for this is the so-called "island effect"—the idea that when humans and other large mammals get to an island where there are not enough food resources and predators, they tend to get smaller, while small mammals will get bigger.

"It's been suggested this is what may've happened to Homo floresiensis (hobbit) and, potentially, it may have also affected the recently discovered Homo luzonensis," Dr. Samper Carro said.

A huge number of fish bones have also been found in the Tron Bon Lei site in Alor, which could offer some important clues.

"The question is, was that enough food for them?" Dr. Samper Carro said. "The archaeological site show gaps which may indicate that, at some point, humans moved from the island, or they weren't using this particular site and they went somewhere else. This could be because of environmental changes, or because they didn't have enough food to survive. More excavations and research in Alor will help us to test these theories."

Dr. Samper Carro says these findings could build on long-held ideas about human migration.

"It's a really exciting time. Human evolution studies have been focused in Africa and Europe for a long time, but now more and more we seem to be getting new findings from Asia that are challenging our previous conceptions. There's been evidence found that Homo sapiens were around in North Africa and the Mediterranean earlier than we thought, coinciding with the presence of different hominins in other parts of the world. Human evolution is getting more exciting and complex."

One of the skulls discovered on Alor was found with fish hooks and ornaments. Dr. Samper Carro says burial traditions are also a good example of the mobility of humans and ideas. "New people come with new traditions, just like we see now," she said. "If you move somewhere, you bring your culture and traditions with you, and the next generation will continue some of those traditions. We can see that reflected in the way these people buried their loved ones."

The research has been published in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Source: Australian National University [August 26, 2019]

Maori social networks revealed by obsidian

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on August 05, 2019 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Australasia, New Zealand, Oceania

Maori in the Auckland and Northland regions were historically quite social, a recent study employing "social network analysis" of obsidian rock has found.

The grey obsidian artefact, left, is from Great Barrier Island and the green obsidian is from Mayor Island. Both were recovered from Mt Wellington [Credit: Mark McCoy]

Obsidian was used as a tool by Maori before European contact and it turns up in archaeological sites across the country.

The most prolific source for obsidian was Mayor Island, about 35 kilometres off the Coromandel Peninsula. It's particularly common in archaeological sites across top of the North Island.

Indeed, in a data set of 2404 obsidian artefacts from 15 northern archaeological locations, 915 of the artefacts were from Mayor Island, almost twice the number of the next most prolific quarry.

Armed with this data set, researchers led by Thegn Ladefoged, an archaeologist at the University of Auckland and a principal investigator at Te Punaha Matatini, employed "social network analysis" to map the sources and final locations of obsidian.

It has nothing to do with Facebook, but is an analytical tool recently developed overseas and adapted for New Zealand by Auckland's Dion O'Neale and Caleb Gemmell.

The researchers found that Maori were getting obsidian from far off sources, including Mayor Island, even though there were obsidian sources closer to home. They must have been doing this for social reasons, Ladefoged, Alex Jorgensen? and colleagues concluded in the article in the science journal Plos One.

Their opening hypothesis was that "people directly accessed the closest, or easiest, obsidian sources in terms of travel time" and effort. But this turned out to be untrue. These people were accessing obsidian from all over the north.

"The obsidian found at archaeological sites is not a direct reflection of geographic distance or the least-cost ease of obtaining the obsidian. There's some sort of social processes going on," he said in an interview.

Ladefoged declined to speculate on these social processes, stating he wanted to stay close to the archaeological data and it doesn't speak to motivation. He couldn't rule out that some obsidian was of better quality than others.

"Most obsidian tools were fashioned and used for short periods of time on an ad hoc basis," the researchers wrote. "Very few 'formal' obsidian tools (adzes, drill-points) are ever archaeologically recovered; the overwhelming majority of obsidian artefacts are unstandardised or 'informal' flake tools."

It's likely these tools were used for all-purpose cutting and scraping, particularly for the working of flax, food and wood. They were probably discarded rather quickly.

Ladefoged was clear, however, that social analysis of obsidian is relatively crude compared to other knowledge.

"Oral traditions are incredible rich, and [offer] far more detailed evidence than archaeology does in many respects," he said in an interview. We see our work as complimentary to those traditions," he said.

The researchers were not seeking to match the archaeological record to Maori knowledge. Rather archaeology produced "different" knowledge about "gross level processes that were going on back in time".

Obsidian is a proxy for levels of interaction between groups. It feeds into a narrative that the culture of the Polynesian settlers changed over time, especially in the north.

Population density increased, farming grew more sophisticated, and after about AD1500, Maori society became more competitive and intense.

That is reflected in the obsidian record. After AD1500, Mayor Island declined as a source of the rock and Maori increasingly accessed obsidian from more local sources.

Author: Will Harvie | Source: Stuff Co NZ [August 05, 2019]

First Australians may have arrived in large groups using complex technologies

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on June 20, 2019 / comment : 0 Anthropology, Australasia, Australia, Early Humans, Indigenous Cultures, Papua New Guinea

New insights into how people first arrived in Australia have been revealed by a group of experts brought together to investigate the continent's deep history.

The emergent picture of regional Pleistocene complexity from genomes, fossils and material culture [Credit: Corey J. A. Bradshaw et al. 2019]

They used sophisticated modelling to determine not only the likely routes travelled by Aboriginal people tens of thousands of years ago, but also the sizes of groups required for the population to survive in harsh conditions.

The research, published today in two companion papers (one in Scientific Reports and the other in Nature Ecology and Evolution), confirms the theory that people arrived in several large and deliberate migrations by island-hopping to reach New Guinea more than 50,000 years ago.

While many Aboriginal cultures believe people have always been here, others have strong oral histories of ancestral beings arriving from the north.

"We know that Aboriginal people have lived here for more than 50,000 years. This research offers a greater understanding of how migration events took place and further evidence of the marine and navigation capabilities used to make these deliberate journeys," said Professor Michael Bird, from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) and James Cook University.

The team of multidisciplinary researchers from CABAH and the CSRIO set out to establish the most likely route travelled to reach the ancient mega-continent, known as Sahul (New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania joined at times of low sea level).

Arrival of First Australians infographic [Credit: Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH)]

"We developed demographic models to determine which island-hopping route ancient people most likely took," said CABAH's Professor Corey Bradshaw, from Flinders University.

"A northern route connecting the islands of Mangoli, Buru, and Seram into West Papua New Guinea would probably have been easiest to navigate and survive. This route was easiest when compared to the southern route from Timor that leads to the now-drowned Sahul Shelf in the modern-day Kimberley region."

The researchers also used complex mathematical modelling -- considering factors including fertility, longevity, past climate conditions, and other ecological principles -- to calculate the numbers of people required for the population as a whole to survive.

The simulations indicate that at least 1300 people arrived in either a single migration event or smaller, successive waves averaging at least 130 people every 70 years or so, over the course of about 700 years.

"This suggests planned and well-organised maritime migration, rather than accidental arrival" Professor Bradshaw added.


The studies confirm the ancestors of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people possessed sophisticated technology and knowledge to build watercraft. This research also showcases the remarkable ability at that time to plan, navigate, and make multiple complicated, open-ocean voyages to directly transport large numbers of people.

"Both studies are unique because they relied on past environmental information and did not use any genetic data. We are very excited to see how further archaeological and genetics studies in CABAH can contribute to this story," says Dr Laura Weyrich, a CABAH investigator at the University of Adelaide.

The papers Early human settlement of Sahul was not an accident and Minimum founding populations for the first peopling of Sahul, were co-authored by scientists from around Australia, including Flinders University, James Cook University, University of Wollongong, University of New South Wales, University of Adelaide, Australian National University, and the CSIRO.

CABAH brings together expertise from diverse academic disciplines to answer fundamental questions about the natural and human history of our region, including how and when people first came to Australia.

Source: Flinders University [June 20, 2019]

Hepatitis B virus sheds light on ancient human population movements into Australia

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on March 17, 2019 / comment : 0 Anthropology, Australasia, Australia, Genetics, Oceania

Australian researchers have used current hepatitis B virus (HBV) genome sequences to deduce ancient human population movements into Australia, adding weight to the theory that the mainland Aboriginal population separated from other early humans at least 59 thousand years ago and possibly entered the country near the Tiwi Islands.

The initial migration route for HBV/C4 into the Tiwi Islands / East Arnhem (orange arrow) [Credit: Dr Lillli Yuen/Doherty]

The discovery was made as an offshoot of the Characterising Hepatitis B in Indigenous Australians thRough Molecular epidemiology (CHARM) study, commenced in 2010 by the Menzies School of Health Research (Menzies). Chronic HBV infection is endemic in Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and is an important cause of morbidity and mortality due to liver disease and liver cancer.

As part of caring for patients with hepatitis B infections in the CHARM study, the research team collected HBV samples from people living in over 30 communities across the NT and found HBV isolated from Aboriginal Australians is a unique strain not found anywhere else in the world, known as HBV/C4.

In the same way that human genome sequences are used to trace ancient human migration, the researchers predicted they could use modern day viral genomes to infer the movement of the people that have carried these viruses over many generations.

Published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, the study used cutting-edge evolutionary analyses of the HBV DNA sequences together with archaeological fossil and human genome data.

The researchers found that the precursor of the modern HBV/C4 virus entered Australia over 51 thousand years ago, and then separated into two groups; one centred in the northwest region, and a second in the central/eastern region of the NT. Strikingly, the two groups share a similar geographical distribution to the two main divisions of Aboriginal Australian languages spoken in Australia today.

The team collected HBV samples from people living in over 30 communities across the Northern Territory [Credit: Dr Jay Roberts]

Co-author on the paper, the Royal Melbourne Hospital's Dr Margaret Littlejohn, who holds an honorary position with the University of Melbourne and is a Senior Medical Scientist in the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory at the Doherty Institute, said that the entry point and timing of ancient human migration into continental Sahul - the combined landmass of Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania - are subject to debate.

"As we were analysing the sequences of HBV isolated as part of this study, we noted that the virus sequences had very strong geographical connections to the communities we visited," said Dr Littlejohn.

"This led us to postulate that we might be able to use this geographical relationship to find out the origin of HBV and how long it might have been in Australia. This is the first time viral genomes have been used in this way in Australia."

Another co-author on the paper, Professor Josh Davis, Senior Principal Research Fellow at Menzies, said the discovery had generated great interest with Aboriginal research partners and patients.

"Most pleasingly, it has raised the profile of hepatitis B in communities. Community members have asked to find out more about hepatitis B and how they can be tested and treated," said Professor Davis.

There’s a more than 60 per cent probability that the HBV/C4 virus entered through either the Tiwi Islands or East Arnhem regions [Credit: WikiCommons]

"It's really exciting to take a novel approach, and use viral genetics to help tell the story of Australia's first people".

The study was endorsed by an Indigenous Reference Group comprised of members representing six different remote communities from across the NT and established by the Menzies Hepatitis B Research Program. The researchers also ensured that results were fed back to the main communities where samples came from.

Senior Aboriginal Health Practitioner, Sarah Bukulatjpi, who is also a co-author on the paper, said: "I am really pleased that we are finding out more details about HBV found in Aboriginal people. This can only help to eliminate hep B for the future.

"It is good for us to learn about this and for us not to be silent or feel shame; the fact the virus is so old helps to add to the evidence that Aboriginal people have been in Australia for a long long time," she concluded.

Source: The University of Melbourne [March 17, 2019]

New evidence suggests humans may have arrived in Australia 50,000 years earlier than first thought

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on March 16, 2019 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Australasia, Australia, Oceania

New evidence discovered by a team of scientists in south-western Victoria suggests people may have been living in Australia 120,000 years ago – more than 50,000 years longer than previous estimations.

Credit: First Australians (2008)

The team, which includes Dr John Sherwood from Deakin University, has spent more than 10 years investigating the Moyjil site in Warrnambool, Victoria, searching unusual shell deposits and burnt stones for evidence of human origin.

Researchers believe the site could contain "middens" created by Aboriginal people during the period known as the last interglacial age – which was roughly 115,000 to 130,000 years ago.

Dr Sherwood, an earth scientist and Honorary Associate Professor within the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at Deakin's Warrnambool Campus, said Moyjil could confidently be assigned as a remnant of the last interglacial age, well beyond the currently accepted ages of the oldest known human sites in Australia and New Guinea.

"The site contains the remains of shellfish, crabs and fish in cemented sand, together with charcoal, blackened stones and features which resemble fireplaces," Dr Sherwood said.

"What makes the site so significant is its great age. Dating of the shells, burnt stones and surrounding cemented sands by a variety of methods has established that the deposit was formed about 120,000 years ago. That's about twice the presently accepted age of arrival of people on the Australian continent, based on archaeological evidence.

"A human site of this antiquity, at the southern edge of the continent, would be of international significance because of its implications for the movement of modern humans out of Africa."

Cliffed headland on the west side of the Hopkins River mouth, Warrnambool. The Moyjil site occurs on the surface of West Stack and along the headland cliff [Credit: John E. Sherwood, 2019]

Along with Dr Sherwood, the core investigatory team includes the University of Melbourne's Professor Jim Bowler; Professor Ian McNiven of Monash University's Indigenous Studies Centre and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage; and Dr Stephen Carey, an earth scientist from Federation University.

Dr Sherwood said researchers had strived for years to rigorously test the hypothesis of a human origin for the site, but the findings were not yet conclusive, because the team had not discovered material such as stone artefacts or human remains which would provide absolute proof of human origin.

"The unusual shell deposit at Moyjil has been subjected to a degree of scrutiny rare if not unprecedented in Australian archaeology," he said.

"We recognise the need for a very high level of proof for the site's origin. Within our own research group the extent to which members believe the current evidence supports a theory of human agency ranges from 'weak' to 'strong'. But importantly, and despite these differences, we all agree that available evidence fails to prove conclusively that the site is of natural origin.

"What we need now is to attract the attention of other researchers with specialist techniques which may be able to conclusively resolve the question of whether or not humans created the deposit."

The research was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria.

Source: Deakin University [March 16, 2019]

American whalers left rock engravings on north Australian coast in 1840s

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on February 18, 2019 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Australasia, Australia, Oceania

A team of archaeologists from The University of Western Australia working with Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation and mining company Rio Tinto have discovered that Indigenous people were not the only ones to leave their mark in the Dampier Archipelago.

Colour filters bring out the inscriptions left by the crew of the American whaling ship Connecticut on a rock on Rosemary Island [Credit: Alistair Paterson]

Archaeologists working across the archipelago to document Aboriginal habitation and long-term creation of ancient rock art have found evidence that the area was visited by the whale ships Connecticut (1842) and Delta (1849), with crew members documenting their respective voyages to the other side of the world from their home ports in the north-eastern US.

Lead author Professor Alistair Paterson, from UWA’s Centre for Rock Art Research and Management, said whaling of the ‘New Holland Ground’ between the Indian and Southern Oceans was an overlooked aspect of early north-west Australian contact history.

“Throughout the 19th century American, British, French and colonial Australian whaling ships plied these waters. American vessels were successful at a time when the British colony at Swan River was young (founded in 1829),” Professor Paterson said.

Archaeologists believe the etchings were made in the rocks while crew members looked for whales [Credit: Alistair Paterson]

Whaleships followed migrating herds of humpback whales along the coast and fished the offshore grounds for sperm whales, also undertaking ship-based bay whaling, anchoring in protected bays for up to three months. It was likely that the ships’ crew members shared knowledge about safe anchorages, hazards and resources.

The discoveries are detailed in a research paper published n the journal Antiquity, asthe earliest report of North American whalers’ inscriptions discovered anywhere in Australia.

The Dampier Archipelago represents one of Australia’s most significant heritage sites and one of the world’s largest rock art complexes. Located about 1550km north of Perth, near the Pilbara mining town of Karratha, the National Heritage-listed archipelago comprises 42 islands as well as the Burrup Peninsula which is home to an estimated one million Indigenous rock carvings.

The carvings were discovered on Rosemary and West Lewis islands, off WA's Pilbara coast [Credit: Alistair Paterson]

Little is known about activity in north-west Australia before the arrival of pastoralists and pearlers in the 1860s and the subsequent, infamous, ‘Flying Foam Massacre’ of the Yaburara people in 1868.

Project leader Professor Jo McDonald said the research highlighted the activities of American whalers in the Dampier Archipelago.

“It shines a light on a brief period when Indigenous people and visiting whalers shared the same territory without obvious major conflict,” Professor McDonald said.

“The whaling inscriptions are both a rare example of maritime inscriptions on rock, and represent the only tangible evidence of this earliest phase of white colonisation of the Australian North West so far discovered.”

Study finds most likely route of first humans into Australia

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on October 31, 2018 / comment : 0 Anthropology, Australasia, Genetics, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea

A new study from ANU indicates the most likely route the ancestors of Aboriginal people took to enter Australia for the first time tens of thousands of years ago.

Gwion Gwion rock art site, Kimberley, WA [Credit: Peter Eve]

Co-lead researcher Shimona Kealy said these people probably travelled through Indonesia's northern islands, into New Guinea and then Australia, which were part of a single continent between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, when sea levels were 25-50 metres below the current level.

"We've created a treasure map of sorts with the likely route across land and water that these incredible people took to reach Australia," said Ms Kealy, a Ph.D. scholar at the School of Culture, History and Language and an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage at ANU.

"We've circled all of the islands that we want to explore further to find archaeological evidence to test if this is in fact the path that they took.

"Archaeologists have yet to explore most of Indonesia's northern islands for human settlements predating the oldest sites found in Australia. These islands could hold the key to the mystery of how the first humans made it to Australia's shores."

The findings challenge a popular theory that these early adventurers travelled from Southeast Asia, through Indonesia and Timor and then across sea to reach Australia's shores and land that is part of the Northern Territory today.

Map of island Southeast Asia showing possible routes to Australia [Credit: Shimona Kealy et al. 2018]

The study modelled the least-cost path from Southeast Asia to Australia, by considering factors such as difficulty to travel up slopes, visibility at sea, access to fresh water along the many potential pathways and the sophistication of maritime technology at the time.

Ms Kealy said the oldest dates for human occupation on the Australian-New Guinea continent (known as Sahul) represented the earliest, indirect evidence for sea faring by humans anywhere in the world.

"This study helps to tell the Australian story, particularly for Indigenous people, and acknowledges the bravery, innovation and maritime technologies and skills of these early modern humans," Ms Kealy said.

The islands directly north and west of Sahul (known as Wallacea) were never connected to the mainland, requiring multiple successful water crossings east from mainland Southeast Asia (Sunda).


"These people hopped their way along these islands, probably looking for a place to live where they would have access to reliable food staples and other resources—the visibility between islands would have been very favourable in terms of enabling this adventurous spirit," Ms Kealy said.

Co-lead researcher Professor Sue O'Connor from ANU said the proposed alternative route through Timor onto the northwest coast of Australia is now seen as less likely as a result of this study's least-cost pathway modelling.

"The suggested route through Timor is also considered less likely given comprehensive archaeological evidence indicates the earliest human settlements in Timor are much younger than those found in Madjedbebe in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory," said Professor O'Connor, a researcher at the School of Culture, History and Language and a Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage at ANU.

The study is published in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Source: Australian National University [October 31, 2018]

How did an Australasian cockatoo reach 13th century Sicily?

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on June 25, 2018 / comment : 0 Archaeology, Australasia, Europe, Italy, South East Asia, Southern Europe, Wildlife

Images of an Australasian cockatoo have been discovered in a manuscript dating from 13th century Sicily, now held in the Vatican library.

One of the four images of the cockatoo gifted to Frederick II by the ‘Sultan of Babylon’. Codex Ms. Pal. Lat 1071, folio 20v [Credit: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2018]

This finding reveals that trade in the waters in and around Australia's north was flourishing as far back as medieval times, linked into sea and overland routes to Indonesia, China, Egypt and beyond into Europe.

The four images of the white cockatoo feature in the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II of Sicily's De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (The Art of Hunting with Birds), which dates from between 1241 and 1248.

These coloured drawings pre-date by 250 years what was previously believed to be the oldest European depiction of a cockatoo, in Andrea Mantegna's 1496 altarpiece Madonna della Vittoria.

Faculty of Arts School of Historical and Philosophical Studies Honorary Research Fellow Heather Dalton in 2014 published an article about the cockatoo in Mantegna's 15th century painting.

This article captured the attention of three Finnish scholars at the Finnish Institute in Rome, who were working on De Arte Venandi cum Avibus and who realised they had found much older depictions.

The red lines indicate major overland trade routes (silk roads). The blue lines indicate the sea route more commonly taken after Vasco de Gama’s fleet landed in Calicut in 1498. The overland route was considered to have extended to the Indonesian archipelago, but new research indicates it stretched to the waters to the north of Australia [Credit: Wikipedia]

The resulting collaboration between Dr. Dalton, Pekka Niemelä (a biologist and environmental scientist at the University of Turku), Jukka Salo (a zoologist and Head of the Sino-Finnish research and conservation program on the Giant Panda) and Simo Örmä (Intendant of the Finnish Institute in Rome) reveals that Frederick's cockatoo was likely to have been either a female Triton or one of three sub-species of Yellow-crested Cockatoo (also known as Lesser Suphur-crested).

This means the bird originated from Australia's northern tip, New Guinea or the islands off New Guinea or Indonesia.

Dr. Dalton said the Latin text next to one of the images reveals that the cockatoo was a gift from the fourth Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt to Frederick II, who referred to him as the 'Sultan of Babylon'. She pieced together the journey a cockatoo would have taken from Australasia to Cairo and then on to Sicily—a journey which would have been primarily overland and taken several years.

"Although our part of the world is still considered the very last to have been discovered, this Eurocentric view is increasingly being challenged by finds such as this," Dr. Dalton said.

"Small craft sailed between islands buying and selling fabrics, animal skins and live animals before making for ports in places such as Java, where they sold their wares to Chinese, Arab and Persian merchants.

"The fact that a cockatoo reached Sicily during the 13th century shows that merchants plying their trade to the north of Australia were part of a flourishing network that reached west to the Middle East and beyond."

The articles is published in the Parergon Journal.

Source: University of Melbourne [June 25, 2018]