Over 60 years ago, stone tools and remains of megafauna were discovered on the Southeast Asian islands of Flores, Sulawesi and Luzon, and a Middle Pleistocene colonization by Homo erectus was initially proposed to have occurred on these islands. However, until the discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2003, claims of the presence of archaic hominins on Wallacean islands were hypothetical owing to the absence of in situ fossils and/or stone artefacts that were excavated from well-documented stratigraphic contexts, or because secure numerical dating methods of these sites were lacking. As a consequence, these claims were generally treated with scepticism . Here we describe the results of recent excavations at Kalinga in the Cagayan Valley of northern Luzon in the Philippines that have yielded 57 stone tools associated with an almost-complete disarticulated skeleton of Rhinoceros philippinensis, which shows clear signs of butchery, together with other fossil fauna remains attributed to stegodon, Philippine brown deer, freshwater turtle and monitor lizard. All finds originate from a clay-rich bone bed that was dated to between 777 and 631 thousand years ago using electron-spin resonance methods that were applied to tooth enamel and fluvial quartz. This evidence pushes back the proven period of colonization of the Philippines by hundreds of thousands of years, and furthermore suggests that early overseas dispersal in Island South East Asia by premodern hominins took place several times during the Early and Middle Pleistocene stages. The Philippines therefore may have had a central role in southward movements into Wallacea, not only of Pleistocene megafauna , but also of archaic hominins.
Some of the earliest evidence for the presence of modern humans in rainforests has come from the fossil deposits of Lida Ajer in Sumatra. Two human teeth from this cave were estimated to be 73–63 thousand years old, which is significantly older than some estimates of modern human migration out of Africa based on genetic data. The deposits were interpreted as being associated with a rainforest environment based largely on the presence of abundant orangutan fossils. As well as the main fossil-bearing chamber, fossil-bearing passages are present below a sinkhole, although the relationship between the different fossil deposits has only been tenuously established. Here, we provide significant new sedimentological, geochronological and palaeoecological data aimed at reconstructing the speleological and environmental history of the cave and the clastic and fossil deposits therein. Our data suggest that the Lida Ajer fossils were deposited during Marine Isotope Stage 4, with fossils from the lower passages older than the main fossil chamber. Our use of stable carbon and oxygen isotope analyses of mammalian tooth enamel demonstrates that early humans probably occupied a closed-canopy forest very similar to those present in the region today, although the fossil orangutans may have occupied a slightly different niche.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Tropical forests in the deep human past’.
Three nothosaur skulls from the Lower Muschelkalk (Lower Anisian) locality of Winterswijk, the Netherlands, were recently acquired by museum Twentse Welle (Enschede) and have thereby become available for scientific description. Thus, these skulls had been identified as Nothosaurus winterswijkensis, but upon examination these skulls challenge the status of this Nothosaurus species. All diagnostic characters are somehow discredited, but the material can also not be unequivocably be considered as Nothosaurus marchicus, which is the only other obvious candidate. As these fossils originate from the same strata as the type of Nothosaurus winterswijkensis and there is no reason to assume that the animals occupied different ecological niches they are more plausibly considered one species, and Nothosaurus winterswijkensis therefore becomes a junior synonym of Nothosaurus marchicus. The diagnosis of Nothosaurus marchicus is enlarged to include all finds.
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