37,000-year-old jewel found in Timor-Leste

A lot pre-historic artifacts have been found in Timor-Leste (or the island of Timor). There are indications that humans first arrived on the island of Timor some over 40,000 years ago. This latest additoin in the findings is quite significant because, contrary to the revailing belief, it shows that these early settlers also had culture:

The most ancient example of shell jewellery, found in Morocco, is 82,000 years old. As humans migrated out of Africa, similar jewellery began to appear in the European archaeological record from about 50,000 years ago. 

Humans moved into east Asia around the same time, but the area has yielded few examples of personal ornamentation of such antiquity. Some researchers had speculated that the early settlers abandoned crafts and so were less technologically advanced. 

Now Michelle Langley of the Australian National University in Canberra and her colleagues have made finds in the Jerimalai cave of East Timor that refute that idea. One was the shell of an Oliva sea snail, dating back 37,000 years [...] – making it the oldest piece of jewellery ever found in the region.

We don't know what happened to these early settlers. They could have moved on to colonise the neigbouring islands, from Australia to the Pacific islands. They could have all died out, perhaps losing out to later settlers. Or simply absorbed into other peoples who came later. Waves of people were still reaching Timor as late as 4,000 years ago, bringing potteries, domesticated animals and farming.

Read more at New Scientist, "Oldest jewellery in East Asia is crafted 37,000-year-old shell".

Still on the subject of pre-history, here is a PhD thesis, by Nuno Vasco Oliveira (he used to work at Ministry of Education), which also explores human migration in Timor and the neigbouring regions by looking at plant remains from thousands of years ago: SUBSISTENCE ARCHAEOBOTANY: FOOD PRODUCTION AND THE AGRICULTURAL TRANSITION IN EAST TIMOR.