The first Cro-Magnons appeared in Indonesia unexpectedly early, about 73 thousand years ago, several thousand years before the first "volcanic end of the world" and the extinction of the mysterious "hobbits" from the island of Flores, according to an article published in the journal Nature.
“The new date for the appearance of people in Indonesia is another argument in favor of the fact that we need to completely reconsider the question of when people left Africa. The early date of the exodus of mankind is not only more in line with genetic data, but also suggests that our ancestors for a very long time had sufficient mental flexibility and skills that helped them adapt to life in new regions,”write Kira Westaway of the university Macquarie in Sydney, Australia and her colleagues.
One meter tall remains of ancient people, which the press almost immediately called "hobbits", were found in Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 and presented to the public in October 2004 by a team of scientists led by the late paleontologist Michael Morwood, one of the authors of the current discoveries.
Morwood and his colleagues announced their find as a new species, named Homo floresiensis. Initially, paleontologists believed that the Floresian people were the descendants of Homo erectus. Thanks to the phenomenon of so-called insular dwarfism, over millions of years of isolation, these ancient people gradually degenerated and turned into "hobbits", whose brains were three times smaller than that of modern Homo sapiens.
The lack of new fossils has led many scientists to believe that "hobbits" were ordinary people who turned into dwarfs due to congenital deformities. Only recently have scientists presented convincing evidence that the "hobbits" were a separate species of people that appeared on the island of Flores at least 700 thousand years ago and disappeared about 50 thousand years ago, long, as it was thought earlier, before the arrival of man in Indonesia.
Westaway and her colleagues found that this was most likely not the case by excavating the Lida Ajer Cave, located in central Sumatra. The remains of ancient people were found here at the end of the 19th century, but they almost did not attract the attention of scientists for the reason that their age, due to the peculiarities of the tropical climate, could not be determined.
Morwood, Westaway and their colleagues were able to solve this riddle by examining the contents of not the artifacts or bones themselves, but the rocks adjacent to them. Inside them, decay products of long-lived radioactive substances accumulate, the study of which makes it possible to fairly accurately estimate the age of the finds.
For example, the accumulation of fission products of the nuclei of radioactive elements inside the grains of quartz sand causes them to glow more strongly when exposed to light or infrared radiation, if they have never left the rock mass.
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After calculating the age of various layers of rocks and stalactites in Lida-Ajer, scientists came to the conclusion that the remains of people were buried in it about 73-62 thousand years ago, several tens of thousands of years before the supposed time of penetration of Homo sapiens into Southeast Asia.
This means that the first people appeared in Australia and Indochina almost simultaneously, and suggests that humanity left Africa much earlier than scientists believed. In addition, such an early date of the Cro-Magnons' penetration into Indochina suggests that they, in principle, could contact the "hobbits" and influence their disappearance.
In addition, this discovery indicates that the first inhabitants of Indonesia survived the "volcanic end of the world" - the explosion of the supervolcano Toba, which occurred about 71 thousand years ago directly off the coast of Sumatra. This catastrophe, as suggested by some anthropologists, was the cause of the almost complete extinction of humanity in this era, and the discovery of Morwood and his colleagues casts doubt on this statement.