Hominins and stone tools in Sunda 1.48 Ma - Implications

A paper published last August in Nature (Hakim, B., Wibowo, U.P., van den Bergh, G.D. et al. Hominins on Sulawesi during the Early Pleistocene. Nature 646, 378–383 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09348-6) reported finding stone tools and flakes older than 1 million years, and possibly up to 1.48 Ma on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia.

The oldest tools that had been found in the area were found at Wolo Sege on Flores Island, home of the minute Hobbit Homo floresiensis, that were 1.02 million years old. Some stone tools and bones with man-made cut marks were discovered in Luzon, and island in the Pilippines, dated to 777-631 thousand years ago. These are much older.

The paper states that> "The dispersal of archaic hominins beyond mainland Southeast Asia (Sunda) represents the earliest evidence for humans crossing ocean barriers to reach isolated landmasses... On Sulawesi, the largest Wallacean island, previous excavations revealed stone artefacts with a minimum age of 194 ka at the open site of Talepu in the Walanae Depression, long preceding the earliest known presence of modern humans (Homo sapiens) in the region (73–63 ka in Sunda). Here we show that stone artefacts also occur at the nearby site of Calio in fossiliferous layers dated to at least 1.04 Ma and possibly up to 1.48 Ma... The discovery of Early Pleistocene artefacts at Calio suggests that Sulawesi was populated by hominins at around the same time as Flores, if not earlier."

Primitive Stone "artifacts"

The authors found "seven flaked stone artefacts... All stone artefacts are made of chert, alternately known as silicified limestone in some of the related literature. This source material is abundantly present among the naturally occurring pebbles, but the stone artefacts differ statistically by their larger size compared with unmodified pebble-sized clasts excavated from the same fluvial sandstone deposits... These results suggest that the stone artefacts were produced by hominins outside the Calio site and carried there for use as tools, further underlining the anthropogenic origin of these objects. It is also possible that some or all artefacts could have been eroded out of riverbanks by laterally migrating fluvial channels, and may therefore be older than the layers in which they were found."

They are not Acheulean, a mark of H. erectus, these are stones used simple tool-making techniques that hint at an Oldowan origin. However, the stones were carefully struck, and retouched: "The flakes were struck by the hard-hammer freehand percussion technique and range from 21.9 to 60.1 mm long along the percussion axes... The reduction of large flakes into smaller flakes, which were themselves retouched, suggests that a two-step reduction process was sometimes used to reduce the natural chert cobbles into suitably-sized tools. The evidence for reduction of cores-on-flakes, frequent core rotation and understanding of hard-hammer fracture mechanics attests to expert technical knowledge within the context of a straightforward, ‘least effort’ approach to toolmaking.".

The authors conclude that "it now seems possible that hominin occupation of this large Wallacean island preceded that of Luzon to the north and is at least as old as, and potentially earlier than, the hominin presence on Flores to the south. However, precisely when hominins first crossed to Sulawesi remains an open question, as does the taxonomic affinity of the colonizing population."

These people predate the hominins of Luzon and the hobbits of Flores. Their stool-making techniques suggests that they were not H. erectus, could they have been the easternmost members of the group that reached Georgia (Dmanisi people), a branch of H. georgicus?

Sulawesi stone artifacts (Fig. 2) in Hakim, B., Wibowo, U.P., van den Bergh, G.D. et al. (2025)

A 2024 paper (D. Ma,S. Pei,F. Xie,Z. Ye,F. Wang,J. Xu,C. Deng, & I. de la Torre, Earliest Prepared core technology in Eurasia from Nihewan (China): Implications for early human abilities and dispersals in East Asia, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 121 (11) e2313123121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2313123121, 2024) noted that in Niwehan, in northern China, west of Beijing, stone tools dated to 1.1 million years ago, were Acheulean style (or mode-2 technology - compared to Oldowan or mode-1), despite the lack of the characteristic handaxe that this type of stone knapping produces. They attribute the lack of handaxes to the poor quality of the raw materials used. They find that these tools "at 1.1 Mya now constitutes one of the world’s earliest occurrences of prepared core technologies... This may suggest that mode 2 hominins dispersed into East Asia much earlier than previously thought and, given that the earliest occupation of China could be over 2 Ma, our results may also point at multiple migrations of early hominins into East Asia throughout the early Pleistocene."

The tools, in my layman opinion, seem to be Oldowan. The authors explain that they are Acheulean because they display higher mental abilities required to perform additional steps in knapping, elaborate techniques, and "standardized end products". They admit that "the differences between CJW (and by extension other Nihewan sites) and the typical Acheulean should not be ignored, and the absence of handaxes in East Asian sites cannot be attributed to raw material availability only... we propose that these mode 2 hominins with complex technical abilities were led to produce smaller tools due to the poor local raw material quality and environmental conditions, which may have also required the development of new survival strategies and/or technological innovations to adapt to the local environmental conditions in this region of northern China."

If we accept their explanations, then two (or more) different populations peopled Asia 1.1 Ma, one in Sunda another in China, with different tool-making techniques. This was way before Denisovans, Neanderthals and modern humans. Were they H. erectus? Dmanisi - H. georgicus? Another unknown hominin?

Could any of these groups have moved north and then east, into America? They would have had 1 million years with the New World for themselves before modern humans arrived around 30 ky ago, or perhaps Neanderthals and⁄or Denisovans arrived during the past 500 ky. Who knows? Nobody ever digs deep enough to look for any remains older than 20,000 years in the New World.

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