Stone tools reveal how island-hopping humans made a living

Edge ground axe from Kelo. Credit: ANU - This article written by Dr Shimona Kealy and Distinguished Professor Sue O'Connor was originally published by The Conversation. Prehistoric axes and beads found in caves on a remote Indonesian island suggest this was a crucial staging post for seafaring people who lived in this region as the last ice age was coming to an end. Our discoveries,  published today in PLOS ONE , suggest humans arrived on the tropical island of Obi at least 18,000 years ago, successfully making a living there for at least the next 10,000 years. It also provides the first direct archaeological evidence to support the idea these islands were crucial for humans' island-hopping migration through this region millennia ago. In early April 2019, we and our colleagues in Indonesia became the first archaeologists to explore Obi, in Indonesia's Maluku Utara province. We found the oldest example from east Indonesia of edge-ground axes, made by grinding a piece of stone to a sharp blade against a rough material such as sandstone.