Ancient Tools Of Unknown Origin Discovered

Archaeologists determined that seven stone tools found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi date back to somewhere between 1.04–1.48 million years ago and belonged to an ancient human species yet to be identified by researchers. The bombshell discoveries were recently published in the journal Nature.

The seven tools were originally excavated between 2019 and 2022 in a cornfield in the city of Calio. They were crafted with hard-hammer percussion techniques in which large pebbles cultivated from riverbeds were struck to form sharp-edged flakes, which would assist with cutting and scraping.

Professor Adam Brumm, of Griffith University's Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, co-led the international research team and described the tools as "simple, sharp-edged flakes of stone that would have been useful as general-purpose cutting and scraping implements."

After determining the age of the tools to be somewhere between 1.04–1.48 million years old, scientists found that the timeline directly corresponds with the arrival of Homo erectus on the neighboring island of Java, where fossils dating back 1.6 million years have been discovered. This newest find introduces more questions than it provides answers regarding the archaeological history of Sulawesi, where previously the oldest discovered fossil was an upper jaw fragment belonging to modern Homo sapiens, dating to just 25,000–16,000 years ago.

Researchers say that the tools' discovery raises tantalizing questions about hominin travel across Southeast Asia. The find would seem to indicate multiple waves of occupation by different species and populations rather than a linear migration. The tools themselves show a nuanced and detailed understanding of stonesmanship, which could only have been passed down through several generations.

"Sulawesi is a wild card—it's like a mini-continent in itself," Brumm said. "If hominins were cut off on this huge and ecologically rich island for a million years, would they have undergone the same evolutionary changes as the Flores hobbits? Or would something totally different have happened?"