Modern humans dispersed out of Africa and reached most corners of Eurasia between 100-40ka, occupying diverse environments from the forests of western Europe to the steppes of northern Asia and to the rainforests of southern Asia. It is during this period that they met and occasionally interbred with several indigenous archaic hominin groups living in these regions. These include Neanderthals and Denisovans, for which we now have strong genetic evidence of close interactions and repeated interbreeding events. The history and dispersal of hominins in Island Southeast Asia (ISEA), the focus of this project, reveals a unique fossil record during the Pleistocene that includes Homo erectus, H. floresiensis, and H. luzonensis. Genetic evidence also suggests that multiple Denisovan populations were living in ISEA, however, a dearth of human fossils in general, and a complete lack of fossil evidence for Denisovans, in ISEA and Sahul leaves a range of important questions, such as anatomy, culture, and behaviour, unanswered. The aim of this project was to rectify this situation by identifying new human fossils from Papua New Guinea and provide detailed taxonomic, chronological, and isotopic information on these remains. This project examined the paleontological record of Papua New Guinea (PNG), a severely understudied but geographically relevant region for understanding hominin dispersal in Sahul.
DENI-CESTOR comes at an important point in time when the application of biomolecular methodologies can harvest significant information from previously excavated material. The lack of human fossils from the Asian and ISEA Pleistocene and early Holocene record is a big limitation to furthering our understanding of human evolution and dispersal outside of Africa and into ISEA, Australia, and Oceania. This project provides crucial new insights in the spatio-temporal spread and genetic history of hominins inhabiting ISEA, with particular reference to multiple Denisovan introgressions in Papua New Guinea. This work has an impact on the larger field of human evolution but also on the society of modern-day people. The results have an influential impact on hypotheses regarding human dispersal into Australia and Oceania. This, coupled with archaeological and paleoenvironmental records from ISEA, PNG, and Australia, have implications for our understanding of hominin sea-faring abilities and island migration. The project is the first of its kind using ZooMS to search for hominin fossils in tropical island environments of ISEA and forms a framework for future scientific studies in the region.
The overall objectives of this project include:
1) To discover new hominin fossils in highland Papua New Guinea sites using ZooMS (collagen mass peptide fingerprinting) on unidentified fragmented archaeological bone from Yuku and Kiowa.
2) To establish the chronology of the new fossils and archaeological context.
3) To identify shifts in diet through stable isotopic analysis of the hominin fossils and fauna remains.
4) To determine the ancestry of the new fossils through ancient DNA analysis.
5) To combine chronologic, stable isotopic, and aDNA data to understand human dispersal in Sahul.
