Video Plus: Watch "Archaeologists Just Found Something Incredible in Indonesia" on YouTube
Watch "Archaeologists Just Found Something Incredible in Indonesia" on YouTube
-https://youtu.be/hCuQdjMuIQs?si=1eIO6GelMx7ngLwC
Transcript: It's always been thought the first humans to master the oceans were our species But new evidence is starting to point to something far older a million years ago Ancient humans may have already been crossing miles of open sea and that leaves us with a shocking question If they did conquer the ocean that early then what else have we underestimated about them? Hi guys welcome back if you're new here, my name is Michael I have a degree in ancient history and on this channel we discuss the unexplainable mysteries of our past. Let's get into it For years the story was simple Early humans like Homo erectus walked out of Africa fanned across mainland Asia and stopped where the land stopped The maze of seas in Indonesia broken by deep ocean channels was treated as a natural moat a barrier marked by the Wallace Line a Geographic boundary thought to be impassable Even during ice ages when sea levels dropped by more than a hundred meters those straight stayed open blue and very deep You couldn't just stroll across Wallatia the island zone between Asia and Australia was supposed to be off limits right up until our species Homo sapiens showed up with real watercraft around 50 to 60 thousand years ago Seafaring was never thought to have occurred before this date But in recent years some cracks in that tidy picture have started to emerge on flores east of the Lombok straight Archaeologists found a small-bodied island hominin known as Homo floresiensis and some stone tools dated to roughly a million years old On Luzon in the Philippines butchered rhinoceros bones and tools at Kalinga landed at about One hundred thousand years old possibly from Homo erectus these finds implied that archaic hominins had somehow made it across Serious water barriers long before Homo sapiens even emerged But still many researchers brush them off treating them as oddities fascinating mysterious But exceptions rather than a rule however last month a groundbreaking paper was published that blows this question wide open in August 2025 nature published a paper titled hominins on Sulawesi during the early Pleistocene Sulawesi is a rugged island in Indonesia one that crucially sits east of the famous Wallace line and has been separated from mainland Asia by deep stretches of ocean for 45 million years however an Indonesian Australian team of archaeologists on the island excavated a site called Kaleo and recovered seven small stone Artifacts sharp-edged flakes and fragments with the textbook scars of deliberate napping They were stone tools and they dated to at least 1.04 million years old Possibly up to 1.48 million years old Vastly older than the next oldest tools found on the island This means someone reached Sulawesi over a million years earlier than we thought and they didn't just wander across land They had to have crossed miles and miles of open water It is the earliest evidence of humans crossing ocean barriers to reach isolated land masses But here's the part that should make your jaw drop to reach Sulawesi from the Asian shelf You must cross real ocean the micarta straight between Borneo and Sulawesi is a deep waterway and no land bridge Existed even at the lowest sea levels So if hominins were on Sulawesi up to 1.5 million years ago, then how did they get there? How is this even remotely possible? Well, there are two plausible options Option one is the traditional theory. They ended up there by accident clinging to storm-torn vegetation rafts or swept out on tsunami debris Imagine that a terrifying journey being blown out to sea certain You would die swept across the ocean until miraculously you land on an island It's possible. However, there are several problems with this view first the distances involved Even at the times of lowest sea level during the Pleistocene the micarta straights were never narrower than about 75 kilometers The odds of a random drift carrying a group large enough to become a breeding population that far are quite low Second survival Imagine a group of hominins washed out to sea no food no fresh water Scorched by a tropical sun most would surely perish long before reaching land and finally the archaeological record doesn't suggest a one-off fluke The tools on Sulawesi spanned thousands of years meaning that whoever arrived survived and populated the island for millennia Which brings us to the other possibility Option two they meant to do it. These hominins weren't just helpless passengers of nature But deliberate seafarers they looked out across the horizon saw land in the distance and somehow built watercraft Sturdy enough to carry groups of them across the open ocean Now just think about how radical that would be more than a million years ago long before Homo sapiens even existed our ancestors may have been planning voyages Coordinating groups and mastering the sea. This isn't just survival. It's imagination technology planning and exploration Perhaps they did it by island hopping, but who knows? However, if true, it is a remarkable feat Either way accident or not this discovery further proves that archaic humans were crossing dozens to hundreds of kilometers of open water More than a million years before homo sapiens took a single stroke. So how does that change things? Firstly as I mentioned earlier We already knew that early humans made it across large stretches of water Flores For example is also cut off from the mainland by deep channels as is Luzon now These were always thought to be accidents the unintentional swept out to sea and somehow surviving and colonizing theory that I mentioned earlier But with the addition of Sulawesi the picture shifts because now this isn't just one or two strange outliers anymore No now we've got multiple islands across the region all showing early human presence all separated by deep sea in my view That tips the balance away from the idea of lucky accidents After all how many flukes can you stack up before it stops looking like chants instead? It's starting to look like a regional pattern early humans deliberately and repeatedly breaching ocean barriers And that is astounding because if these crossings weren't just accidents then early humans a million years ago We're doing something we never thought they could Planning to build even the simplest raft you need to gather materials tie them together and keep the thing buoyant enough to carry a group of people You need coordination communication and some kind of leadership to organize the trip and you need In other words the ability to look at a distant horizon and think there's land out there Let's try to reach it in other words. These weren't just mindless Wanderers stumbling around the tropics. They were problem solvers explorers and innovators This pushes the roots of human curiosity and ingenuity far deeper back into the past than we'd ever imagined Now some will still be skeptical They'll argue that we're reading too much into a pile of stone tools that accidents can and do happen and that maybe a few lucky Castaways survive long enough to leave a trace fair enough But when you step back and look at the pattern flores, Luzon and now Sulawesi is getting harder to think these were all freak one-off events At some point coincidence starts looking like behavior And the weight of evidence is beginning to lean towards the idea that early humans weren't just passengers of nature They were agents of their own voyages But let's take this one step further if early humans were crossing to Sulawesi more than a million years ago Then we have to ask how far could they have gone because once you've cracked the problem of sea travel The rest of Wallacia opens up and sitting just beyond it is Sahul the joined landmass of Australia and New Guinea Now the textbook answer is that Homo sapiens were the first to set foot in Australia around 50 to 60 thousand years ago Sites like Badged Baby in the Northern Territory are held up as the oldest solid evidence of human presence But in recent years some controversial findings have hinted that the story might not be so simple Take Moigil on the coast of Victoria. At first glance it looks like an ordinary rocky shoreline But scattered there are strange signs concentrations of shell deposits, cracked and burnt stones and patches of what some Archaeologists argue are the remains of ancient hearths, but shockingly these features have been dated to a hundred and twenty thousand years ago In fact archaeologists argue the evidence quote supports a cultural origin over a natural origin It's just that the absence of associated stone artifacts means this conclusion cannot be proved definitively However if that interpretation is right It would mean humans were in Australia more than twice as long as the standard timeline allows Not just arriving with the Great Sapiens expansion out of Africa But potentially much much earlier and perhaps by a different lineage entirely Now this is fiercely debated Plenty of scholars argue that the burnt stones at Moigil could be the work of natural bushfires not campfires That the shells could be natural accumulations In other words don't rewrite the textbooks just yet But if even part of the Moigil evidence does point to people being there a hundred and twenty thousand years ago Then suddenly the Sulawesi discovery takes on a new weight because we now know Hominins were in the neighborhood crossing straights reaching islands pushing boundaries hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens showed up and that opens the door to a radical possibility What if Australia's human story doesn't start with us at all? What if earlier hominins, Homo erectus, Sovens or even some unknown cousin made the leap into Sahul long before sapiens ever dreamed of it It's a tantalizing possibility, but let's just speculate for a minute Say it's true that humans mastered sea travel this early What would that mean for how we think about human intelligence and history? If the Sulawesi tools really do represent deliberate sea crossings over a million years ago Then the timeline of human ingenuity just shifted dramatically We tend to think of Homo sapiens as the only true explorers the species that tamed fire built boats and gazed at the stars But this evidence suggests those sparks of creativity and daring were alive long before us Imagination and planning weren't exclusive to our lineage They were baked into the broader human story from much earlier and that changes how we see our ancestors For decades the stereotype of early hominins was of half aware wonderers Stumbling across the savannah driven purely by survival But if they were looking at an open horizon Designing and building rafts and deliberately launching into the unknown then we have to credit them with a kind of vision They weren't just surviving they are experimenting innovating and in their own way dreaming The implications of that would be huge It means intelligence didn't suddenly explode with Homo sapiens Instead the roots of exploration and curiosity stretch much deeper into Homo erectus And maybe even beyond it suggests the human spark wasn't a lightning bolt But a long slow fire smoldering for over a million years and perhaps most provocatively if our ancestors could sail across Wallatia that long ago then the map of ancient human migration might be far wider than we've ever admitted Maybe other islands held visitors whose traces we haven't yet found Maybe Australia's story really does begin not 60,000 years ago with us but with another branch of humanity entirely In short discoveries like Sulawesi Remind us that human history isn't a straight line of progress with Homo sapiens striding onto the stage as the first real thinkers It's a tangled web of experiment failures and bold attempts by many different human species And every time we push that timeline back It forces us to rethink what it means to be human and just how long we've been daring to cross the horizon Thanks so much for watching guys If you enjoyed this video, please leave a comment or a like down below or consider subscribing to my channel. See you next time
Brief Commentary:
The "Big Picture" Comment
This rewrites everything we thought we knew about the 'dumb caveman' stereotype. If a different kind of human was sailing to islands over a million years ago, it means the human drive to explore, to see what's over the horizon, isn't unique to us. It's a legacy that's millions of years old. What other 'impossible' journeys did they make that we haven't found evidence for yet?"
