Fossil DNA hints at mysterious Toalean Culture

The 7,000-year-old skeleton of a teenage hunter-gatherer from Sulawesi in Indonesia might be the first remains found from a mysterious, ancient culture known as the Toaleans. Sulawesi has some of the world’s oldest cave art, but ancient human remains have been scarce on the island. The largely complete fossil of a roughly 18-year-old Stone Age woman was found in 2015, buried in the fœtal position in a limestone cave. DNA extracted from the skull suggests that she shared ancestry with New Guineans and Aboriginal Australians, as well with the extinct Denisovan subspecies of ancient human. The Toalean people, known only from scant archæological evidence, such as distinctively notched stone tools, were thought to have lived in Sulawesi at around the same time.