Ancient Indonesian's Thrived During The Ice Age

A series of archeological digs in eastern Indonesia have unearthed 30,000-year-old artwork and jewelry from the Ice Age. These findings back new evidence that early inhabitants of Indonesia were more culturally advanced than previously thought.

The discovery was made in an area called Wallacea, a set of islands which sit on the continental shelf separating Southeast Asia and Australia. The area today is made up of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, Maluku, and Nusa Tenggara.

Previous findings put the first humans who migrated through the Wallacea region at around 47,000 years ago. The discovery of jewelry and ancient artwork suggests that the people who inhabited these parts during the Ice Age were more advanced than what previously thought.

The discovery, published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, was a joint effort by Indonesian and Australian researchers. The study aimed to comprehend the nature of evolution, culture, and behavior of the first people to inhabit Australia, said study lead Adam Brumm, a researcher at Griffin University.

"We uncovered abundant evidence for a variety of symbolic behavior, suggesting a flourishing artistic culture existed on Sulawesi during the tail end of the last Ice Age," Brumm told Live Science.

Ancient inhabitants of Eurasia migrated to Australia boat across Wallacea. The study proposed that the spiritual beliefs of indigenous Aboriginal people of Australia was likely inspired by existing cultures in Wallacea.

"These cultural adaptations might have been crucial to the colonization of the ancient continent of Sahul—what is now Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania—given the rich, diverse, unique and unfamiliar animal and plant species found there," Brumm said.

Among the discovered artifacts in archeological digs spanning between 2013 and 2015, were two pieces of jewelry made from animals native to the region. An archeological dig in Leang Bulu Bettue—a cave in Sulawesi—found beads made from the teeth of a boar along with a pendant made from the finger bone of a bear cuscus. Both of these animals are exotic species exclusive to Sulawesi.

"Early inhabitants of Sulawesi fashioned ornaments from body parts of endemic animals, suggesting modern humans integrated exotic faunas and other novel resources into their symbolic world as they colonized the biogeographically unique regions southeast of continental Eurasia," the study states.

The portrayal of these exotic species were deemed essential to the culture of the humans who colonized Australia. The spiritual relationship between humans and animals is a key part of Aboriginal cultures, and this is thought to be inspired by cultures originating in Wallacea.

Sulawesi was also the site where scientists uncovered an extinct and previously undiscovered human species nicknamed the "hobbit" due to its short stature. According to researchers, there is likely a correlation between the two discoveries.