Ancient Human Species Called Indonesia Home around 100,000 Years Ago
Some of the first excavating site
Home erectus (H. Erectus) was the first human to been able to walk up straight, and it is one of the most successful human species in history. Where they first come across in Africa in some 1.9 million years ago with a relatively large brains and H. erectus where highly skilled toolmakers who had begun to venture beyond the African continent towards Asia crossing into Java via land bridges about 1.6 million years ago.
At the times Java was a savanna liked open woodland where eventually sea levels starts to rise and it isolated the H. erectus species on Java and driving the rest of its species across the world into extinction roughly 500,000 years ago and H. erectus in Java continued to live on.
In the 1930s, a team of Dutch explorers had discovered an entire cornucopia of fossils along Java’s Solo river nearby the village of Ngandong where they have excavated over thousands of animals bones which were identified as H. erectus but due to the limited technology and methodology at the time, as even scientist struggled to figure out how old this fossil were.
H. Erectus species which were ancient human who first started to walk up straight
One of the biggest obstacles for these late scientist was the facts that they couldn’t exactly pinpoint the location of original excavation and after a hard detective work by O. Frank Huffman, an archaeologist at the University of Texas in Austin, concluded that the original excavation site lies in what is now a sugarcane field near a dirt road. All in all, the efforts to trace the original excavation site took at least five years, with Huffman even consulting the grandchildren of the original Dutch explorers.
As later H. erectus split up into at least two additional species as they made their way through Southeast Asia where H. floresiensis, found on the Indonesian island of Flores, and H. luzonensis, found on Luzon Island in the Philippines. Then research suggested that they may have interbred with Denisovans which these Denisovans then mated with modern humans in Indonesia and New Guinea as recent as 30,000 years ago.