OXFORD, ENGLAND—According to a Phys.org report, an international team of researchers including Dylan Gaffney of the University of Oxford and the University of Otago has discovered evidence of human occupation in Mololo Cave on one of the Raja Ampat Islands, which are located off the coast of New Guinea. The occupation of the cave has been dated to between 55,000 and 50,000 years ago. Archaeologists have been looking for evidence for human migration through the islands of the Pacific Ocean to Sahul, the Pleistocene continent that connected New Guinea and Australia, along both a northern and a southern route. The discovery of the site in Mololo Cave suggests that migrating humans may have traveled a northern route some 10,000 years before the southern route was used. The evidence includes a piece of resin extracted from a tree, animal bones, and the bones of marine fish and sea urchins carried to the cave from the coast, some nine miles away. Gaffney and his colleagues think that migrants could have traveled by watercraft from this island to Sahul, a distance of less than four miles, some 50,000 years ago. “We used computer simulations of Pleistocene sea currents to model how long it would have taken to get between these islands,” he said. “We found that there would have been a high rate of success for seafarers wanting to cross these water gaps, and skilled seafarers would have done this relatively easily,” he explained. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Antiquity. To read about stone statues on New Guinea that may be more than 3,000 years old, go to “Honoring the Ancestors.”
