Abstract
The skeletal remains of Late Pleistocene-early Holocene humans are exceptionally rare in island Southeast Asia. As a result, the identity and physical adaptations of the early inhabitants of the region are poorly known. One archaeological locality that has historically been important for understanding the peopling of island Southeast Asia is the Niah Caves in the northeast of Borneo. Here we present the results of direct Uranium-series dating and the first published descriptions of three partial human mandibles from the West Mouth of the Niah Caves recovered during excavations by the Harrissons in 1957. One of them (mandible E/B1 100") is somewhat younger than the ‘Deep Skull’ with a best dating estimate of c30-28 ka (at 2σ), while the other two mandibles (D/N5 42–48" and E/W 33 24–36") are dated to a minimum of c11.0–10.5 ka (at 2σ) and c10.0–9.0 ka (at 2σ). Jaw E/B1 100" is unusually small and robust compared with other Late Pleistocene mandibles suggesting that it may have been ontogenetically altered through masticatory strain under a model of phenotypic plasticity. Possible dietary causes could include the consumption of tough or dried meats or palm plants, behaviours which have been documented previously in the archaeological record of the Niah Caves. Our work suggests a long history back to before the LGM of economic strategies involving the exploitation of raw plant foods or perhaps dried and stored meat resources. This offers new insights into the economic strategies of Late Pleistocene-early Holocene hunter-gatherers living in, or adjacent to, tropical rainforests.
Highlights
Island Southeast Asia spans a geographic area of approximately 3 million km2 and comprises close to 20,000 islands
A collection of fragmentary human remains recovered by the Harrissons in the 1950s, some of which were archived until recently among the fauna from the West Mouth [30], have remained unstudied. Based on their excavation grid coordinates and recent reconstructions of the chronostratigraphic sequences of the West Mouth [29,30,31] they might be Late Pleistocene-early Holocene in age. It is within this context that we present the results of direct U-series dating and the first published descriptions of three partial human mandibles (Figs 2 and 3, S1 and S2 Tables, S1 Fig) from Area A and the Area A/B intersection the West Mouth of the Niah Caves recovered during excavations by the Harrissons in 1957
At the level of the mental foramen (MF), its height is 2.5σ below the pooled Late Pleistocene/early Holocene (LPH) sample mean (30.8±3.5 mm, n30); none of the known mainland or island Southeast Asian or Northeast Asian mandibles (26.0–36.8 mm, n12), nor the mandibles from a small sample of Neolithic burials we examined from the West Mouth of the Niah Caves are this short
Summary
Island (or ‘maritime’) Southeast Asia (iSEA) spans a geographic area of approximately 3 million km and comprises close to 20,000 islands. Despite the long history of archaeological research in iSEA, the remains of Late Pleistocene AMH have been found at only four localities. These comprise partial skulls and postcranial elements from Wadjak in Indonesia discovered in 1888 (Wadjak-1) by B.D. van Rietschoten and in 1890 (Wadjak-2) by Eugene Dubois [11]; and most recently estimated to be c35 ka [12]. We note that human remains have been recovered from Callao Cave in the Philippines including a metatarsal of uncertain taxonomic affinity dated with the U-series method to a minimum age of c67 ka [15] and an undescribed tooth dated to c50 ka [12]
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