Tools from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, dating back 118,000 years, may have been used to hunt elephants dwarf. SHARP. They were probably used to hunt and cut the elephant or the dwarf buffalo, and even to scrape their skins:a few hundred sharp shards as well as choppers have been unearthed at the site of Talepu, in the Indonesian island of Sulawesi . "These artifacts were roughly fashioned and used from -118,000 to -194,000 years ago", say Australian, Dutch, Danish and Indonesian researchers in the journal Nature . Sulawesi is the largest and oldest island in the Wallacea (see map ), a biogeographic zone that separates mainland Asia from Australia and Papua New Guinea. "It was able to play a pivotal role in the settlement of Indonesia", estimates paleontologist Gerrit van den Bergh, from the University of Wollongong (Australia) and it is located only 400 km from the island of Flores where a tiny fossil man, -95,000 years old, measuring barely 1m and weighing 25 kg was discovered in 2003. The"hobbit" dubbed Homo floresiensis sparked controversy, with some researchers claiming it was not a full-fledged species but just Homo sapiens degenerate.
"Shedding light on the origins of these hobbits would be the best way to shut up our detractors" , explained in 2008 to Sciences et Avenir, its discoverer, the late Mike Morwood (died 2013). It was he who decided to search other islands where the ancestors of the Lilliputian could have come from. 800 km to the west, the island of Java, linked to Flores by a chain of "rocky confetti" sown across the sea has already yielded the remains of Homo erectus over a million years old. Mike Morwood therefore preferred to head for Sulawesi, 400 km to the north "because powerful ocean currents surge rapidly from the south of this island towards Flores" , says his colleague and “successor” Gerrit van den Bergh. The two researchers imagined that prehistoric men could have been dragged off despite themselves during stormy events, stranded on the desert island and survived there by following their own evolutionary path... even if it meant reducing in size.
Four possible artisans
Sulawesi had already delivered tools but impossible to date because they were found on the surface. The new excavations, carried out between 2007 and 2012, confirmed an ancient occupation, between - 118,000 and - 194,000 years ago. "The Oldest Homo floresiensis is 95,000 years old, so those in Sulawesi were cutting rock shortly before the hobbits did the same in Flores", the researchers point out. Unfortunately, the only bones found are those of game, buffaloes, elephants or pigs. It is therefore impossible to link a species of Homo to these summary knives and "crushers". For researchers, there are four possible artisans:Homo sapiens , straight from Africa and at a gallop (we find their traces in the Levant around – 120,000 years ago). Homo erectus installed in the region for more than a million years, and of which we also find tools dated from - 800,000 years to - 1 million years on the island of Florès, even if the continuity between the lithic industry H.erectus and that of H.floresiensis is not yet demonstrated. Homo floresiensis who would have colonized several surrounding islands. And finally Denisovans, a Siberian species whose genes persist in part of the Melanesian population not far from Sulawesi.
ancestors moved from island to island more often than we thought"
The mystery of the origins of the Hobbit of Flores is therefore only getting more complicated for the moment... even if Gerrit van den Berghen sees the kinship between Homo erectus and the Homo floresiensis as the best guess. "We have evidence that an archaic man lived in Sulawesi, 100,000 to 200,000 years ago" , comments the American anthropologist Russel Ciochon in the magazine Science . "This discovery makes the hobbit more plausible as a species in its own right. It shows that ancestors moved from island to island more often than previously thought" . This is the only certainty:Homo sapiens was not the only prehistoric man capable of crossing large expanses of liquid. The sea leg is apparently an ancient and very widely shared skill.
The tools were found on the island of Sulawesi, in the area of Wallacea, 400 km from the island of Flores. Sunda designates the western third of the island of Java and the Indonesian province of Banten. Sahul means Papua. © Nature .