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Archaeologists in West Papua found ancient tree resin that they say is the oldest evidence of human arrival in the Pacific. The team’s research—published earlier this month in Antiquity—describes hardened 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 last of which was crucial for timing the human presence in the area.
“Some bones in the deposit are likely natural, including smaller animals like small rodents and microbats,” said Dylan Gaffney, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford and the paper’s lead author, in a Phys release. “The other larger animals like terrestrial birds, marsupials and megabats are more likely to result from human predation.”
The team also found the remains of marine animals—the teeth of carnivorous fish and sea urchins—in the cave, indicating the ancient human occupants took them from the coast (9.32 miles/15 kilometers away) and processed them in the cave.
The tree resin pieces the researchers found did not form naturally. According to the team, who described their work in an article for The Conversation, the resin was made by humans who cut bark from a tree and then snapped the hardened resin into shape. Though they are not sure how the resin was used, they speculate that it may have been a fuel source for fires. Radiocarbon dating of the layers in which the resins were found indicate that humans were in the cave as early as 55,000 years ago.
Exactly when and how humans migrated across the Pacific islands remains a matter of debate. In the ancient past, other hominins like Homo erectus and the diminutive Homo floresiensis made their way across the islands (some researchers believe that H. floresiensis is merely a miniaturized version of H. erectus). Though it’s very likely that the Mololo cave was occupied by Homo sapiens, it’s possible that the assemblage was made by humans more closely related to Denisovans, a mysterious group of extinct hominins.
The ‘hobbits’ of Flores island went extinct about 50,000 years ago, and this research suggests early modern humans likely arrived on Waigeo around the same time, when the distance between Waitanta (the paleoisland that is now the distinct islands of Waigeo and Batanta) and the paleocontinent Sahul was just 1.55 miles (2.5 km) at its narrowest.
“It is likely that Waitanta was first frequented by those living further west in Wallacea, but it remains possible that humans initially entered Sahul via Australia and rapidly moved north-west, arriving at Waitanta from what is today the Bird’s Head Peninsula of New Guinea,” the study authors wrote.
The team also simulated the potential routes ancient humans could have taken into New Guinea by way of the Raja Ampat archipelago. Now, they plan to further investigate sites in the archipelago that could clarify the exact timing of human arrivals—and potentially the precise group of humans who were there.
