According to an international team of anthropologists, an ancient skull collected from a cave in the Annamite Mountains in northern Laos is the oldest modern human fossil found in Southeast Asia.
The skull pushes back the clock on modern human migration through the region by as much as 20,000 years and indicates that ancient humans out of Africa left the coast and inhabited diverse habitats much earlier than previously appreciated.
The scientists, who found the skull in 2009, were likely the first to dig for ancient bones in Laos since the early 1900s, when a team found 16,000-year-old skulls and skeletons of several modern humans in another cave in the Annamite Mountains.
Dr Laura Shackelford, anthropologist at the University of Illinois and co-author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, had stated that the old modern human fossil that was discovered in Annamite Mountains is a particularly old modern human for that region. Other modern human fossils in China or in Island Southeast Asia may be around the same age but they either are not well dated or they do not show definitively modern human features; unlike the skull which is very well-dated and shows very conclusive human features.
Dr. Shackelford further explained that there are no other artifacts found together with the skull which suggests that the cave was not a dwelling or burial site. The find reveals that early modern human migrants did not simply follow the coast and go south to the islands of Southeast Asia and Australia, as some researchers have suggested, but that they also traveled north into very different types of terrain.
The find supports an ‘Out-of-Africa’ theory of modern human origins rather than a multi-regionalism model. The age of the skull gives a possibility that the fossils in the vicinity could be direct ancestors of the first migrants to Australia, or it could also be that mainland Southeast Asia was a crossroads leading to multiple migratory paths.
Shackelford also added that the discovery also bolsters genetic studies that indicate that modern humans occupied that part of the world at least 60,000 years ago. The skull finding indicates that the migration out of Africa and into East and Southeast Asia occurred at a relatively rapid rate, and that modern humans weren’t limited to environments that they had previously experienced. The skull fossil serves as an evidence proving that modern humans were there long before we thought they were there.
SCI-NEWS
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