It would be expected that human remains of the Late Upper Pleistocene in Southeast Asia would be of modern humans, H. sapiens sapiens. Generally speaking, this is the case. The oldest such evidence is the ‘deep skull’ from the Niah Cave, Sarawak, usually considered to be c. 40 000 years old, although there is quite a lot of evidence of disturbance at that site, including burials of more recent age which may have cut into earlier layers. Recent research does however appear to confirm the dating of the deep skull as being somewhat older than 40 000 BP. Other modern human remains have been found at late Upper Pleistocene sites in Vietnam and Thailand, associated with Hoabinhian assemblages, and the Philippines (Tabon Cave on Palawan).
The recent discovery of hominids of small stature on the island of Flores is still subject to considerable discussion. Found in a cave site called Liang Bua, several individuals are associated with what seems to be a typical small artifact assemblage as previously described, with an Upper Pleistocene date range of 94 000 to 18 000 years. Such a recent date is associated everywhere else on the globe with modern humans, H. sapiens sapiens. The Flores remains however have been assigned to a new species, H. floriensis, and, according to the scholars who have examined them, retain many characteristics of H. erectus. This evidence prompts several questions: were there modern humans on Flores at this time, contemporary with H. floriensis? If so, who produced the artifacts? Is it feasible to suppose that H. erectus evolved into a diminutive species on Flores only, particularly given the gap between dates of 700 000 and 94 000 within which no artifactual or fossil evidence falls? Only further research on the available evidence, or more evidence from Flores and elsewhere, can address these issues.
Foods, and many sites demonstrate a reliance on freshwater and marine shellfish, together with small to medium size mammals.
In the Early Holocene, indirect evidence for agricultural practices appears. Particularly in shell middens on the coast of northern Vietnam and also northeast Sumatra, Hoabinhian type tools are associated with cord-marked pottery and small slate knives, believed to be used for agricultural purposes. Pottery has a long tradition in Japan where it was associated with the Jomon hunter-gatherers of the terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene, but this is almost unique; elsewhere, it is generally believed that ceramic pots are associated with the more settled lifestyle of agriculturalists. It is this late manifestation of the Hoabinhian that was originally designated the Bacsonian. There is a further question as to whether edge-ground stone axes were associated only with the Bacsonian. This technology, which in Europe was considered to be associated with farmers only and of Holocene age, has been found in both Australia and Japan to be dated to over 30 000 years ago and attributed to hunter-gatherers. There do not seem to be any well-dated examples of this age in Southeast Asia.
World History
