SYDNEY, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) -- A research team, co-led by Australian archaeologists, has found the 7000-year-old remains of a teenage female in Indonesia, with the DNA throwing new light on how early people may have migrated to Australia.
The discovery, published in Nature magazine on Wednesday, is the first known skeleton from a foraging culture called the Toaleans.
Archaeologist Professor Adam Brumm, from Griffith University's Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, said the remains, which had affectionately been nicknamed Bessé, were found curled in a foetal position in a limestone cavern in the province of South Sulawesi, Indonesia.
"The Toaleans were early hunter-gatherers who lived a secluded existence in the forests of South Sulawesi from around 8,000 years ago until 1,500 years ago, hunting wild pigs and collecting edible shellfish from rivers," Brumm said.
Results from the genomic analysis show that Bessé shares about half of her genetic makeup with present-day Indigenous Australians and people in Papua New Guinea (PNG), an island country about 150 km north of Australia.
"Essentially, she is a distant relative of modern-day Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians," Brumm said.
Thousands of years ago, when sea levels were much lower than now, Australia and PNG were part of the same landmass called Sahul.
"These seafaring hunter-gatherers were the earliest inhabitants of Sahul, the supercontinent that emerged during the Pleistocene (Ice Age)," Brumm said.
"To reach Sahul, these pioneering humans made ocean crossings... but little about their journeys is known."
The earliest evidence of human occupation in what is now Australia was 65,000 years old. The discovery suggests Bessé's ancestors could have been among those who first made the voyage across the ocean.
"The discovery of Bessé and the implications of her genetic ancestry show just how little we understand about the early human story in our region, and how much more there is left to uncover," Brumm said.
Another author, Akin Duli from Indonesia's Hasanuddin University said more testing would need to be done to reveal the full genetic legacy of the Toaleans.
"But it would now appear that the population history and genetic diversity of early humans in the region were more complex than previously supposed," Duli said. Enditem
