Emily Chan
An excavation in central-north Timor Leste, a country located on the eastern side of the island of Timor in Southeast Asia, has revealed thousands of artifacts within a cave called the Laili rock shelter.
The artifacts serve as new evidence that points to the migration route that early humans took to arrive in Australia.
Archaeologists uncovered snail, crab, and barnacle shells, as well as fragments from stone tools and a grindstone.
There were also bones from birds, lizards, snakes, fish, frogs, and bats. Radiocarbon dating puts the artifacts at about 44,000 years old. These items were found on top of a layer of sediment that had no evidence of human habitation.
“Looking at the layers in Laili cave, it’s like ‘bang’—you can really see clearly when the people arrive,” said Sue O’Connor, an archaeologist with the Australian National University. “It was like a line had been drawn between the two layers—before people and after people. It was so clear.”
The size of the cave, the prominence of its location, and the ease of access to resources make it unlikely that any early humans traveling through the area missed it. According to O’Connor, the cave was the “perfect place for people to establish an occupation base camp.”
It is estimated that the untouched sediment at Timor Leste is between 54,000 to 59,000 years old. But humans weren’t on Timor until 44,000 years ago.
Previously, research has shown that humans were in Australia earlier than that, around 65,000 years ago. The latest discovery suggests that the island of Timor was not part of the migration route from Southeast Asia to Australia.
Australia was once part of the Sahul paleocontinent, which included the landmasses that are now known as Tasmania and New Guinea. Archaeologists had two main theories for how early humans migrated from Southeast Asia to Sahul.
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