A new study indicates the slow pace of ancient humans crossing from the lands of Asia to the island of Java

According to a new historical study, it took hundreds of thousands of years for ancient humans to travel from the lands of Eurasia to Indonesia, and access to Java Island may have delayed half a million years from what was previously known. Although Homo erectus evolved on the continent of Africa and is one of the first species of our species and is believed to be our direct ancestor, it was the oldest hominin that roamed outside the continent.

Homo erectus migrated across the continent of Asia in less than two hundred thousand years, and this migration was remarkably fast compared to the rest of the hominids who failed to migrate very far from Africa over millions of years of previous development, where fossils show that they were in Georgia before 1.8 million A year in China, 1.6 million years ago, and in Indonesia 1.7 or 1.8 million years ago, but the history of their presence in Indonesia in the past was questioned, especially with opinions that it believed did not reach the Southeast Asian islands until 1.3 million years ago.

To settle the dispute, Shuji Matsu'ura and his colleagues from the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tsukuba, Japan, decided to re-examine the Sangiran site on Java Island, which contained more than a hundred human fossils, as the team took a closer look at the sediment layers where the remains were found, and found layers of Volcanic ash inside the crust of sediments, so they used two methods of dating volcanic material to restrict the life of surrounding sediments.

According to Matsu'ura, the best guesswork for the history of the first human-like colonies at Sangiran is 1.3 million years ago, with a maximum of 1.5 million years, and it is unclear why it took so long for Homo erectus to reach Indonesia, although some explanations go towards the lack of this species. For sailing skills.

Sources : arageek