Rewriting human history

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Tags: archaeology, history, SBS, summer-2010

Dr Andrew Fairbairn

The world’s earliest known high-altitude human settlement, dating back 49,000 years, has been found buried under volcanic ash in the mountains of Papua New Guinea.

The team of archaeologists, which includes UQ’s Dr Andrew Fairbairn (pictured), discovered campsites at altitudes of 2000m that were occupied 44–49,000 years ago during the last ice age – the highest altitude sites occupied by Homo sapiens ever recorded. Their findings were published recently in Science.

The discovery also reveals Australasia’s first colonisers rapidly moved from coastal regions after their arrival from South East Asia to also inhabit the highlands.

The prehistoric highlanders, who lived in the Ivane Valley of Papua New Guinea’s Owen Stanley Range Mountain near Kokoda, made stone tools, hunted small animals and ate yams and nuts of the local Pandanus tree.

Dr Fairbairn said the team uncovered almost perfectly preserved nutshells at the campsites, which is the first time that such ancient plant material has been found in the region.

“The volcanic ash layers seem to have produced a unique microenvironment that has fought off the rain and cold to preserve nutshells and yam leftovers, which are present in large quantities and give us exciting and unique evidence of the diet of the first New Guineans,” he said.

The campsites were occupied during a relatively warm part of the last ice age – the Pleistocene – when Papua New Guinea was joined to Australia as part of the continent of Sahul. However, the ancient highlanders would still have experienced temperatures below 0°C.

Dr Fairbairn said the discoveries provided an unusually detailed view of a mobile and resourceful community that adapted to unfamiliar territory and environments by carefully targeting high-energy plant and animal foods.

“Papua New Guinea’s mountains have long held surprises for the scientific community and here is another one – maybe they were the home of Homo sapiens’ earliest mountaineers,” he said.

Joining Dr Fairbairn on the research team were Glenn R. Summerhayes, Matthew Leavesley, Herman Mandui, Judith Field, Anne Ford and Richard Fullagar.

By Kathy Grube

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