This isn't ancient history, but who cares? I love maritime archaeology and the story of the Batavia shipwreck, mutiny and massacre is dramatic and bloody.
"On the morning of the fourth of June 1629, the Batavia was wrecked on Morning Reef, on the Houtman Abrolhos (Lat. 28º 29.422S, Long. 113 º 47.603E), off the coast of Western Australia. She was the first of the Dutch ships lost off the west coast of Australia. The shipwreck was a prelude to an extraordinary tragedy." Source: Western Australian Museum.
I'm not even going to try to summarize what happened next, but this is one of the craziest and most brutal sea stories I've ever run across. Highly recommended.
"Humans may have exited out of Africa and arrived in Southeast Asia 20,000 years earlier than previously thought, a new study suggests. Findings also suggest humans could have potentially made the crossing to Australia even earlier than the accepted 60,000 to 65,000 years ago. " Source: Science Daily.
This result is based on "the dating of a cave site in West Sumatra, called Lida Ajer, which provides [the] first evidence for rainforest use of modern humans [sic]." According to Ars Technica, "Sumatra would probably have been connected to surrounding land: reconstructions of the climate and sea levels at the time suggest that these regions would have been accessible to humans. What’s surprising, though, is that Lida Ajer would have been rainforest at the time."
Rainforests are difficult places in which to live. "The lack of carbohydrate-rich plants and large animals for eating would have made survival difficult," according to one expert. “Successful exploitation of rainforest environments requires the capacity for complex planning and technological innovations.” (Ars Technica)
There were other challenges as well. The people living in the Lida Ajer cave may have witnessed the massive eruption of the Toba supervolcano, believed to have occurred between 69,000 and 77,000 years ago. This eruption was so huge that some scientists believe it almost caused the extinction of the human species. (The scale of the Toba catastrophe has been called into question by other studies.)
According to New Scientist, "[t]wo ancient teeth found in an Indonesian cave [Lida Ajer] hint that our species had arrived there as early as 73,000 years ago – and may have had to deal with the biggest supervolcano eruption of the last few million years and also adapt to the challenges of living in thick rainforest."
The dating is the biggest surprise. This find contradicts the current belief that modern humans were just starting to migrate out of Africa around this time. Obviously, if people were already living in Indonesia, the move out of Africa must have happened much earlier -- unless modern humans actually originated in Asia as most experts once believed. (Next video is from 2009.)
If modern humans did originate in Africa, the migration to southeast Asia and Australia would have been a long and arduous journey requiring fairly sophisticated tools:
"To get from Africa to Australia, H. sapiens would also have needed to march across mainland Asia, then sail across the sea. The route should have included a stopover on the islands of Indonesia and Timor, but no H. sapiens artefacts older than 45,000 years had been found on these islands, until now." (New Scientist)
One way or another, this find shows (if the dating is accurate) that the human species is not only much older, but that early humans were a lot more sophisticated and technically advanced than currently believed. Their adaptability and problem-solving abilities shouldn't be surprising, though. They were, after all, just as human as we are. The find also demonstrates how much our fragmentary picture of human evolution depends on chance discoveries around the world.
In evolutionary terms, our nonhuman ancestors probably first appeared in Africa -- that's what the genetic studies seem to show, at least -- but I won't be amazed if future discoveries show that the first real humans emerged somewhere in Asia.
"The Mutawintji National Park, formerly the Mootwingee National Park, is a protected national park that is located in the Far West region of New South Wales, in eastern Australia." Source: Wikipedia. These rock engravings are located in the Mutawintji Historic Site in the national park.
According to the New South Wales government, "[the] estimated age of [the] rock art at Mutawintji ranges from 8000 to 5000 years old. During this time, [the] Mutawintji Historic Site was an important 'cultural tourism' site, visited by tribes or language groups from surrounding areas. These groups included Wilijalia from Broken Hill area, Paruntji to the north-east, Malyangappa and Wanyuparluku to the west, Kungatitjito from the north, and Wonkumura from near the Queensland border (1). Mutawintji was also used for shelter and as a reliable water supply, because of the water stored in the rock holes."
Note: "Australian archaeologists have discovered a piece of the world's oldest axe in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia," according to Phys.org.
"The axe fragment is about the size of a thumbnail and dates back to a Stone Age period of 45,000 to 49,000 years ago - at, or very soon after, the time humans arrived on the continent, and more than ten millennia earlier than any previous ground-edge axe discoveries."
This fragment was discovered among "food scraps, tools, artwork and other artifacts from Carpenter's Gap, a large rock shelter known to be one of the first sites occupied by modern humans."