A young woman who lived on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi as early as around 7,300 years ago had a surprisingly ancient East Asian pedigree, mixed with a dash of Denisovan ancestry, a new study finds.
Researchers excavated the woman’s partial skeleton from South Sulawesi’s Leang Panninge cave.
Until now, many scientists thought that skilled mariners and farmers called Austronesians first spread East Asian genes through Wallacea, a group of islands between mainland Asia and Australia that includes Sulawesi, Lombok and Flores, around 3,500 years ago.
The ancient Sulawesi woman’s DNA “provides the first indication that an Asian ancestry was present in Wallacea long before the Austronesian expansion,” says archaeologist Adam Brumm of Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.
Indonesian archaeologists who unearthed the skeleton — and who coauthored the new study with Brumm, population geneticist Selina Carlhoff of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and other colleagues — nicknamed the young woman, who was 17 or 18 years old when she died, Besse (pronounced BESS-eh). In ethnic communities of South Sulawesi, Besse is an affectionate term for individual girls and women.
Researchers excavated the woman’s partial skeleton from South Sulawesi’s Leang Panninge cave.
Until now, many scientists thought that skilled mariners and farmers called Austronesians first spread East Asian genes through Wallacea, a group of islands between mainland Asia and Australia that includes Sulawesi, Lombok and Flores, around 3,500 years ago.
The ancient Sulawesi woman’s DNA “provides the first indication that an Asian ancestry was present in Wallacea long before the Austronesian expansion,” says archaeologist Adam Brumm of Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.
Indonesian archaeologists who unearthed the skeleton — and who coauthored the new study with Brumm, population geneticist Selina Carlhoff of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and other colleagues — nicknamed the young woman, who was 17 or 18 years old when she died, Besse (pronounced BESS-eh). In ethnic communities of South Sulawesi, Besse is an affectionate term for individual girls and women.
