Homo erectus " found in
Java in 1891 In 2007 analysis of cut marks on two bovid bones found in
Sangiran, showed them to have been made 1.5 to 1.6 million years ago by clamshell tools, and is the oldest evidence for the presence of early man in Indonesia. Fossilised remains of
Homo erectus, popularly known as the "
Java Man" were first discovered by the Dutch anatomist
Eugène Dubois at
Trinil in 1891, and are at least 700,000 years old, at that time the oldest human ancestor ever found. Further
Homo erectus fossils of a similar age were found at
Sangiran in the 1930s by the
anthropologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald, who in the same time period also uncovered fossils at
Ngandong alongside more advanced tools, re-dated in 2011 to between 550,000 and 143,000 years old. In 1977 another
Homo erectus skull was discovered at Sambungmacan.
Homo floresiensis In 2003, on the island of
Flores, fossils of a new small hominid dated between 74,000 and 13,000 years old and named "
Flores Man" (
Homo floresiensis) were discovered much to the surprise of the scientific community. This 3-foot-tall hominid is thought to be a species descended from Homo Erectus and reduced in size over thousands of years by a well known process called
island dwarfism. Homo floresiensis was first dated to relatively recent time periods - as recent as 14,000 years ago, however re-examination of the sediments has revised these dates and these hominins have been shown to have been present in Indonesia since at least 700,000 years ago, until about 60–50,000 years ago. In 2010 stone tools were discovered on Flores dating from 1 million years ago.
Homo sapiens The archipelago was formed during the thaw after the latest
ice age. Early humans travelled by sea and spread from mainland
Asia eastward to
New Guinea and
Australia.
Homo sapiens reached the region by around 45,000 years ago. In 2011 evidence was uncovered in neighbouring
East Timor, showing that 42,000 years ago these early settlers had high-level maritime skills, and by implication the technology needed to make ocean crossings to reach Australia and other islands, as they were catching and consuming large numbers of big deep-sea fish such as tuna.
Earliest migration Early Homo sapiens reached the archipelago between 60,000 and 45,000 years ago. Many but not all Southeast Asian Homo sapiens fossils prior to about 8,000 BCE have been identified as being distinct from
Austronesians. The remnants of the pre-Austronesian groups of Southeast Asia survive in isolated pockets in Malaysia (
Semang) and the Philippines (
Aeta). The descendants of the pre-Austronesian inhabitants of the
Indonesian Archipelago are still the majority in the eastern portion of the region, in islands such as
New Guinea, the
Maluku and
East Nusa Tenggara. Genetic studies show that in Western Papua there was significant genetic admixture between Negritos, Australo-Melanesians and Austronesians.
Rock art Approximately 40,000 years ago, early humans produced prehistoric
rock art motifs in volcanic caves on the island of Sulawesi. This means that humans at both extremes of the Pleistocene Eurasian world, Europe and Indonesia, were producing rock art during the same time period. The most notable rock art sites in Indonesia are the
Maros-Pangkep rock art sites at the caves in
South Sulawesi province. There are two distinct styles of art within these caves, both dated to the Pleistocene period. The first consists of human hand stencils, made by spraying wet pigment spit from the mouth, around human hands that were pressed against the cave wall surfaces. The second is a less common style of cave art, characterized by images drawn of larger, naturalistic profile paintings of wild land mammals that were endemic to the island during the Pleistocene period, such as
miniature buffalos and
warty pigs. Other than
Altamira, the Maros cave art is one of the most extensive sites of cave rock art in the world. These Indonesian prehistoric cave paintings might be the oldest cave art in the world. This find has challenged the established interpretation that Europe was the birthplace of prehistoric rock art. On 11 December 2019, a team of researchers led by Dr. Maxime Aubert announced the discovery of the oldest hunting scenes in prehistoric art in the world which is more than 44,000 years old from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu' Sipong 4. Archaeologists determined the age of the depiction of hunting a pig and buffalo thanks to the calcite 'popcorn', different isotope levels of radioactive
uranium and
thorium. On 16 March 2020, a team of archaeologists led by
Griffith University has uncovered the first known examples of 'portable art', which are probably 14,000 - 26,000 years old, from a
limestone cave named Leang Bulu Bettue in
Sulawesi and published in the academic journal
Nature Human Behaviour. While one of the stones contained an
anoa (water buffalo) and what may be a flower, star or eye, another depicted an astronomic rays of light. In January 2021, archaeologists announced the discovery of at least 45,500 years old cave art in Leang Tedongnge cave. According to the
journal Science Advances, cave painting of warty pig is the earliest evidence of human settlement of the region. Adult male pig, measuring 136 cm x 54 cm, was depicted with horn-like facial warts and two hand prints above its hindquarters. According to co-author Adam Brumm, there are two other pigs that are partly preserved and it appears, the wart pig was observing a fight between two of them.
Prehistoric jewelry Ornaments made from bones and teeth of
babirusa deer-pig and bear cuscuses (
Ailurops ursinus) marsupial, was unearthed from limestone caves in Sulawesi. These jewellery was ingeniously manufactured from the teeth of the primitive pigs and bones of marsupials, estimated dated to between 22,000 and 30,000 years ago.
Austroasiatic migration and admixture Negritos and
Australo-Melanesians dominated most of the Indonesian archipelago until 6,300 years ago, when two massive human migrations from
Indochina swayed the demographics of the archipelago. Austroasiatic people spread via Indochina, from Yunnan in Southern China to Vietnam and Cambodia, then to the Malay Peninsula before finally arriving in Sumatra, Borneo and Java. Genetic studies show that
Javanese,
Sundanese and
Balinese people have significant proportion of Austroasiatic ancestry. Genome studies show that several ethnic groups in western Indonesian archipelago have significant
Austroasiatic genome markers, despite none of these groups speaking Austroasiatic languages. Thus this could mean, that there was either once a substantial Austroasiatic presence in Island Southeast Asia, or Austronesian speakers migrated to and through the mainland. The substantial presence of Austroasiatic ancestry in western Indonesian archipelago suggests that the western branch of Austroasiatic migration from Indochina might have taken place in pre-Neolithic era. The contesting suggestion argues for Austroasiatic-Austronesian admixture — which probably took place in the Malay Peninsula or southern Vietnam, intermixing there before continuing to western Indonesia. ==Chronology==