New Lineage of Humans Discovered in Ancient DNA

by Talik Hill, Staff Writer

A team of archaeologists unearthed the decomposed remains of a teenage girl around the age of 18 years old within the Leang Panninge cave, in South Sulawesi, Indonesia during an excavation in 2015. The analyzed DNA disclosed a lineage that hasn’t been discovered anywhere else in the world.

Obtaining the DNA from the 7,200-year-old bones was a strenuous process for the researchers in the island region “Wallacea,” an area between Asia and Australia. The examined DNA divulged that the girl had common ancestors along with the Papua New Guineans & Indigenous Australians of modern-time, who all showed up in Wallacea about 50,000 years before. The genes discovered did not reflect any other population previously known, proposing the idea that a group of archaic people went from Asia to Wallacea at an earlier date than expected, with no modern kin.

The Toaleans, as they are named by archaeologists, were a cryotic group of ancient hunter-gatherers whose primary diet consisted of edible shellfish and wild pigs. This culture of people had leftover tools with carefully crafted arrowheads, however, had limited fossils and impractical recovered DNA. Making the teenage girl’s skeleton the only recovered remains of theToalean people and the first time, prehistoric DNA has been found in Wallacea. This new revelation has altered our preconceived notions of the history of the world; our knowledge related to genetics and archaeology is constantly changing, and discoveries like this illustrate the potential scope of how much we still haven’t become aware of about the world. But, with every new open door, comes improvement, development, and a greater understanding of the world around us.