Modern humans and Homo erectus did not co-exist in Java

Ninety years after Dutch geologists excavated human fossils in central Java, scientists finally have pinpointed the fossils' age at around 120,000 years. In a study reported today in Nature , The University of Queensland's Associate Professor Michael Westaway and Professor Jian-xin Zhao helped to establish the age and a new chronology for "a critical site for understanding the later stages of human evolution". "This tells us Homo erectus lived to Australia's north just before Homo sapiens arrived on the Australian continent 65,000 years ago," said Dr Westaway, from UQ's School of Social Science. "The dates we have now established provide no evidence for Homo sapiens and Homo erectus overlapping in time at that location. This is a very important result. "Palaeoanthropologists have argued for years that Homo erectus may have had some genetic contribution to modern human populations migrating through the region, but there is no fossil evidence supporting this," he said. The new age ranges also indicate that there was no chronological overlap between the two species.