Traces of human presence more than 1 million years old discovered on an Indonesian island

After the Flores Man, discovered on the eponymous Indonesian island in 2003, and the human remains exhumed a few years later on the Philippine island of Luzon, which also gave its name to a species, curiosity shifted to another Indonesian island, Sulawesi (Celebes). This expanse of land covering several hundred thousand square kilometers had already yielded some prehistoric secrets, including tools at least 194,000 years old. But nothing to rival the remains of 1.02 million-year-old artifacts found on Flores, nor those found on Luzon about 700,000 years old.

" We've been searching for many years for evidence of early humans in Sulawesi, so it's a huge relief to finally find it ," enthuses Adam Brumm, an archaeologist and co-author of the study published August 6 in the journal Nature . With colleagues from Australian and Indonesian universities, they dug into the sedimentary layers of the Calio site, working ten centimeters by ten centimeters. This conscientious method paid off, allowing the unearthing of seven flint tools.

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