By around 30,000 years ago, Australo-Melanesians were present in all regions of Southeast Asia. In most lands they were eventually displaced from the coastal lowlands and pushed to the uplands and hinterlands by later immigrants.
Archaeological evidence suggests that human beings arrived in Sarawak – overland – at least 40,000 years ago.
According to the field of genetic genealogy, people first resided in Siberia by 45,000 B.C.E. and spread out east and west to populate Europe and the Americas.
Early humans traveled by sea and spread from mainland Asia eastward to New Guinea and Australia. Homo sapiens reached the region by around 45,000 years ago.
The oldest remains of modern humans in the islands, however, is the Tabon Man of Palawan, carbon-dated to 47,000 ± 11–10,000 years ago. The Tabon man is presumably a Negrito, who were among the archipelago’s earliest inhabitants, descendants of the first human migrations out of Africa.
The flutes, made from bird bone and mammoth ivory, come from a cave in southern Germany which contains early evidence for the occupation of Europe by modern humans – Homo sapiens.
They used carbon dating on nuggets of hearth charcoal and eggshells to discover that the shelter was first occupied about 50,000 years ago.
The emergence of ceremonial burial required profound human ingenuity: abstract thought, planning depth, and symbolic communication. This cognitive leap, evidenced by organized graves (like the 50,000-year-old Neanderthal burial at La Chapelle-aux-Saints) and symbolic grave goods, reinforced community bonds, empathy, and cultural memory.
The 7 centimetre (2 3/4 inch) needle was made and used by our long extinct Denisovan ancestors, a recently-discovered hominin species or subspecies.
