Aug. 25 (UPI) — Researchers said Wednesday that the discovery of DNA in a partially preserved human skeleton in Southeast Asia could give science a rare view of human ancestry in a region where such glimpses are often hard to come by.
The discovery, which was made in 2015, was detailed Wednesday in the journal Nature Genetics.
Experts say that ancient DNA is difficult to find in Southeast Asia because tropical conditions quickly degrade remnants that are left behind.
Adam Brumm, a professor of archaeology at Griffith University in Brisbane in Australia, told ABC News that researchers excavated the skeleton from a limestone cave in Leang Panninge on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Researchers determined through DNA that the skeleton belonged to a teenage female hunter-gatherer. She shared similarities, they say, with the present-day Papuan and Indigenous Australian groups. They said the populations split about 37,000 years ago.
“Morphological characters indicate that this Toalean forager was a 17-18-year-old female with a broadly Australo-Melanesianaffinity, although the morphology does not fall outside the range of recent Southeast Asian variation,” the researchers said in Nature Genetics.
The female was buried in a shallow grave within a Toalean burial complex around 7,200 years ago, Brumm said. It appeared that several large rocks were placed next to her.
Brumm said the artifacts around her appeared to be “really sophisticated stone tools” such as chipped arrowheads.