Overview

• Archaeologists excavated seven sharp stone flakes from a sandstone layer at the Calio site in southern Sulawesi, dating them to at least 1.04 million years ago.
• Combined palaeomagnetic and uranium-series dating of the surrounding sandstone and a pig fossil provided age estimates between 1.04 million and 1.48 million years.
• The Calio findings extend Sulawesi’s earliest known hominin occupation by hundreds of thousands of years beyond previous evidence from around 194,000 years ago.
• No hominin fossils have been recovered at Calio, so researchers cannot yet assign the tools to a specific species, though Homo erectus is considered the most likely candidate.
• The discovery underscores early hominins’ ability to cross deep-sea barriers into Wallacea and offers new insights into Pleistocene migration and island evolution.