37,000-Year-Old Human Skull Could Rewrite the Prehistory of Southeast Asia

Deep Skull did not belong to Indigenous Australians, study finds.

New analysis of the 37,000-year-old Deep Skull from Borneo is reconstructing the prehistory of Southeast Asia.

First discovered almost 60 years ago in Niah Cave in Sarawak, the skull was dated back 37,000 years. At the time, archaeologists concluded the remains belonged to an adolescent male from a population of early modern humans closely related, or even ancestral, to Indigenous Australians.

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Deep Skull bolstered the development of the ‘”two-layer” hypothesis, which suggests that people related to Indigenous Australians and New Guineans initially settled Southeast Asia, and were replaced by a second wave of inhabitants from southern China a few thousand years ago.

However, through a more comprehensive investigation of the ancient cranium, Darren Curnoe from University of New South Wales in Australia and his team have challenged this view. Writing in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, the researchers reveal that Deep Skull actually belonged to an older woman rather than a teenage boy, and that it is more similar to people from the northern parts of Southeast Asia than to Indigenous Australians.

^{Some of the bones from the 37,000 year old the Deep Skull from Niah Cave. Credit: Curnoe} 

"We've found that these very ancient remains most closely resemble some of the indigenous people of Borneo today, with their delicately built features and small body size, rather than indigenous people from Australia," said Curnoe in a press release.

"Our analysis overturns long-held views about the early history of this region."

If their conclusion that Deep Skull is closely related to the contemporary indigenous people of Borneo is correct, this would mean that these same people have inhabited the region for at least 37,000 years — much longer than the 3,000-years span suggested by the two-layer hypothesis.

Study co-author Ipoi Datan, Director of the Sarawak Museum Department, says: "It is exciting to think that after almost 60 years there's still a lot to learn from the Deep Skull — so many secrets still to be revealed.”

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