These cultural relics include pendants and beads made of bones. In a new study, researchers report that "pigs and deer" and marsupials like monkeys can be traced back at least 22,000 years.
Archaeologists discovered these cultural relics in Valeca. Valeca is an area with a width of 65,438+0,000 miles (65,438+0,600 kilometers), mainly an Indonesian island, which separates Southeast Asia from Australia. Now these cultural relics are revealing this area and nearby Australia. Previous studies have found that modern humans arrived in Wallace about 47,000 years ago. Adam Bloom, the lead author of this study, said that in the Pleistocene (often called the Ice Age), about 1 1,000 islands that made up this archipelago were habitable. During this period, the archaeological records of human beings in this area only include a few sites from seven islands, and archaeologists from Griffith University in Australia.
"Wallacea" is the place where the Hobbit fossil was discovered in 2003, and it is also one of the oldest rock arts in the world in 20 14, "Bloom said. This is obviously extremely important for us to understand human evolution and the culture and experience of the first people who lived in Australia more than 50 thousand years ago. However, from the perspective of archaeology, we only have the most basic understanding. "[Photo of the Hobbit,
The artistic treasures of the Ice Age described in the new study of symbolic jewelry have recently been unearthed in caves and rock shelters in Lingbulu Bettue, the largest island in Sulawesi.
"We found a lot of evidence to prove various symbolic behaviors." At the end of the last ice age, Sulawesi presented a prosperous art and culture, "Bloom told Life Science. Kdspe "kdsps": Archaeological excavated objects from 2013 to 20 15 years ago, ranging from 22,000 to 30,000 years ago. These include disc-shaped beads made from the teeth of a wild boar-like animal with fangs (also known as "pig deer") and pendants made from the phalanges of a monkey-like arboreal marsupial animal (known as bear's tip). Bloom said that these animals are "exotic animals found only on this island. [Photo: The oldest cave art in the world was discovered in Indonesia]
Prehistoric decorations were excavated from the "Ice Age" in Sulawesi. (m. langley; A.Brumm) Other handicrafts include cutting stone products with geometric patterns; Fragments of mineral pigments, such as red and ochre; Researchers say there is also a long hollow bear's pointed bone with traces of red and black pigments, which may be used as a spray gun to create rock art:
The researchers noticed that until now, no cultural relics of different ice ages have been found from kangaroos. This discovery is very important because it challenges a long-standing view that the hunting and gathering communities in Pleistocene tropical areas of Southeast Asia are not as advanced as those in Europe in the late Paleolithic period, which has always been regarded as the birthplace of modern human culture. Bloom said: "KDSPsE", a creative person, has been unearthed in Wallace's works before, and only rare evidence of the Pleistocene era has been unearthed. Examples of jewelry and other cultural complexities come from Wallace and nearby Nanyang. This makes some researchers think that during the Pleistocene, people in these areas were less developed than those in other parts of the world. Others think that the exploration in this area is far less than that in other places in the old world, and these cultural relics may reflect the complexity of culture. It may not be well preserved among kangaroos.
These new findings show that the ancient humans in kangaroos are "creative and artistic people, and their symbolic culture can easily adapt to marsupials and other novel animal life forms encountered in this area," Bloom said.
These cultural adaptations may be crucial to the colonization of the ancient Sahur continent (now Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania), because there are rich, diverse, unique and unfamiliar animal and plant species there. To sum up, the intricate symbolic relationship between humans and animals is a characteristic of Australian indigenous culture, and its root may be in the journey of human beings crossing Valencia before the Sahur people settled down. Bloom said:
Although the extinct human remains nicknamed "Hobbit" were found on Flores Island in the south of Sulawesi, Indonesia, Bloom stressed that "this discovery has no obvious connection with Hobbit lineage."
Future research will continue to dig in this site, with the aim of finding more evidence for the artistic culture and symbolic life of some cave artists that have long been known in the world, and trying to determine the time when modern people colonized Sulawesi for the first time. Bloom said:
Scientists presented their findings online today (April 3) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This is an original article about life science.