Archaeologists in West Papua have found ancient tree resin that they say is the oldest evidence of human settlement in the Pacific. The team’s research—published earlier this month in Antiquity—describes solid tree resin from Mololo Cave on Waigeo Island, part of the Raja Ampat archipelago. Excavations in the cave revealed stone artifacts, animal bones, charcoal and tree resin, the latter of which was important in estimating the time of human presence in the area.
“Some of the fossils in the deposit are likely organic, including small animals such as small rodents and microbats,” said Dylan Gaffney, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the paper, in the release of Phys. Other larger animals such as land birds, marsupials and megabats are likely to be eaten by humans.”
The team also found fossils of marine animals—teeth of carnivorous fish and sea urchins—in the cave, indicating that the ancient inhabitants took them from the beach (9.32/15 km) and prepared them in the cave.
The pieces of tree resin the researchers found did not form naturally. According to this team, who described their work in an article on The Conversation, the resin was made by people who cut the bark from the tree and crushed the solid resin. Although they are not sure how the incense was used, they think it may have been a source of ignition. Radiocarbon dating of the layers in which the resins were found shows that people were in the cave 55,000 years ago.
When and how people migrated across the Pacific islands remains a matter of debate. In the past, some hominins are similar Homo erectus and decreasing Homo floresiensis they crossed the islands (some researchers believe that H. floresiensis it’s just a smaller version of H. erectus). Although it is possible that the Mololo cave was full Homo sapiensit is possible that the interbreeding was done by people closely related to the Denisovans, a mysterious group of extinct hominins.
The ‘hobbies’ of the island of Flores disappeared about 50,000 years ago, and this study suggests that modern humans may have arrived in Waigeo at the same time, when the distance between Waitanta (the paleoisland that is now the separate islands of Waigeo and Batanta) and the paleocontinent Sahul was only 1.55 miles (2.5 km) away.
“It is possible that Waitanta was first visited by those living west of Wallacea, but it is also possible that people first entered Sahul via Australia and moved quickly to the northwest, arriving at Waitanta from what is now the Bird Peninsula of New Guinea,” the study authors wrote.
The team also measured the possible routes by which ancient people could have entered New Guinea via the Raja Ampat archipelago. Now, they plan to continue investigating sites in the archipelago that could pinpoint the exact time people arrived—and possibly the exact group of people who were there.
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