Another archeological finding is that of a 7,200-year-old young female skeleton on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Mail Online reported that what had just been recently discovered has been identified as a new type of ancient human from a group named "Toaleans," who died just around 1,500 years ago.

An international team of researchers isolated DNA from the ancient homo sapiens, discovered in the Leang Panninge, also known as Bat Cave.

Named Besse, the ancient homo sapien is said to be the first known skeleton from an early foraging culture known as the Toaleans which are seafaring hunter-gatherers who resided 8,000 to 1,500 years ago in South Sulawesi.

According to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, homo sapiens are species that all other living human beings on Earth are a part of.

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'Besse' the Ancient Homo Sapiens

Discovered buried in a fetal position and partly covered by rocks, researchers believe Besse was aged between 17 and 18 years old at the time of death.

As indicated in this report, Besse is an unusual "genetic fossil," sharing roughly 50 percent of her genetic composition with modern Indigenous Australians and those in New Guinea and the Western Pacific Islands.

Such composition comprises DNA inherited from the now-nonexistent species of humans known as Denisovans, the Neanderthals' distant cousins whose fossils have just been discovered in Tibet and Siberia.

It stays unclear what occurred in the Toalean culture including its people. Archeologists affectionately called her Besse in permission to a custom among royal families of conferring this nickname on newly born princesses before they were given their formal names.

Toalecean Culture

Doctoral candidate Selina Carloff, from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the study's lead author, separated DNA from the skull's petrous bone.

It was a great challenge, as the remains have strongly been degraded by the tropical climate, she explained. Using radiocarbon dating, the team was able to determine Besse's remains' age to be between 7,300 and 7,200 years old.

The Toalean culture, as described in The Conversation, to which Besse belonged, has been discovered in a comparatively small area on the southern peninsula of Sulawesi.

Sulawesi, for its part, is the 11th largest island in the world, which is part of a geographical shift zone known as Wallacea, which is also part of the Wallace Islands.

The new researched, which came out in the latest edition of Nature, marks the first time ancient human DNA has been reported from Wallacea.    

Something Unforeseen Shown in Besse's Genome

Essentially, analyses showed that something unforeseen in the genome of Besse, a deep ancestral signature from an early contemporary human population of Asian origin.

This particular group did not merge with the Aboriginal Australians and Papuans' predecessors, proposing it may have entered the region following the first populating the supercontinent called Sahul.

According to Indonesian senior author Professor Akin Duli from the University of Hasanuddin, it is unlikely that there is much information known about the identity of the Toaleans' early ancestors until more ancient human DNA samples become available from Wallacea.

It would now appear though, added Duli, that the history of population, as well as the genetic diversity of early humans in the place, were more complicated compared to what was supposed in the past.

Related information about the Toaleans is shown on Daily News's YouTube video below:

 

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Check out more news and information on Homo Sapiens in Science Times.