Abstract
The resource-poor, isolated islands of Wallacea have been considered a major adaptive obstacle for hominins expanding into Australasia. Archaeological evidence has hinted that coastal adaptations in Homo sapiens enabled rapid island dispersal and settlement; however, there has been no means to directly test this proposition. Here, we apply stable carbon and oxygen isotope analysis to human and faunal tooth enamel from six Late Pleistocene to Holocene archaeological sites across Wallacea. The results demonstrate that the earliest human forager found in the region c. 42,000 years ago made significant use of coastal resources prior to subsequent niche diversification shown for later individuals. We argue that our data provides clear insights into the huge adaptive flexibility of our species, including its ability to specialize in the use of varied environments, particularly in comparison to other hominin species known from Island Southeast Asia.
Highlights
The resource-poor, isolated islands of Wallacea have been considered a major adaptive obstacle for hominins expanding into Australasia
It has been suggested that Late Pleistocene populations of H. sapiens expanding across the globe were able to flexibly exploit varied, and often extreme, environments—including deserts, tropical rainforests, high-altitude settings, and deep-sea maritime habitats—and specialize in the occupation of them, enabling our species as a whole to proliferate even while local communities may sometimes have failed[6]
Earlier and contemporaneous Homo species expanding into Eurasia in the Early and Middle Pleistocene (2.6 Ma–126 ka) made generalized use of forest and grassland mosaics[7,8], potentially making them vulnerable to more extreme Late Pleistocene environmental changes and unable to survive on islands depauperate in large terrestrial fauna[9]
Summary
The resource-poor, isolated islands of Wallacea have been considered a major adaptive obstacle for hominins expanding into Australasia. Wallacea is an isolated series of islands that was never connected to the neighboring Pleistocene landmasses of Sunda or Sahul, necessitating water crossings to reach[9,11,12,13,14,15] These islands have been hypothesized as hosting depauperate island forest environments, lacking in reliable terrestrial protein and carbohydrate resources[13,16,17]. Sapiens in Wallacea at the sites of Asitau Kuru (formerly Jerimalai) and Laili[18,19] At the former, faunal remains and cultural artifacts suggest Late Pleistocene human reliance on marine shellfish and fish, obtained in part through offshore fishing[13]. Human reliance on pelagic fishing at Asitau Kuru has been questioned[26]
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