News
22.08.2019
An Ice Age savannah corridor let large mammals spread across Southeast Asia
Tübingen research team finds evidence of an open landscape through which animals and people could walk to today’s Indonesian islands
New research from the University of Tübingen indicates that the Thai-Malay Peninsula – where parts of Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand are located – was at least partly an open savannah during the Ice Age, when the peninsula was part of a much larger land now known as the Sunda Shelf. It is likely to have provided a corridor for large mammals from mainland Asia to reach today's islands of Sumatra, Borneo and Java for the first time, between 120,000 and 70,000 years ago. That is the conclusion reached by Dr. Kantapon Suraprasit, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Tübingen and a lecturer at Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), and Professor Hervé Bocherens of the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen, working with other Thai researchers. The team carried out isotope analyses on the teeth of Ice Age mammals found on excavations in the region. Scientists have long hotly debated how animals and early humans migrated between the mainland and the islands of Southeast Asia. These latest findings strengthen the hypothesis that a savannah corridor existed during the Ice Age, giving humans and animals relatively easy passage to the south and east from mainland Asia. The study has been published in Quaternary Science Reviews.
The Yai Ruak Cave, located in Thailand’s Krabi Province, was excavated in 2017 by a team of Thai paleontologists from Chulalongkorn University and the Department of Mineral Resources (Bangkok), with the help of local people. In the cave sediments, the excavators found some near-complete lower jaw bones, individual teeth and bones. The fossils were of the Malay porcupine, the Javan rhinoceros, the Sambar deer and extinct relatives of the spotted hyena. “This is the southernmost evidence found in Southeast Asia of this kind of hyena,” says Hervé Bocherens. This supports the hypothesis that in the Pleistocene, mammals were able to spread further south. Because sea levels were much lower during the Ice Age, today’s islands of Sumatra, Borneo and Java on the Sunda Shelf were connected by land bridges. Although human fossils were not found in the cave, anatomically modern humans may have been present in the area at that time, the researchers say.
Publication:
Kantapon Suraprasit, Sutee Jongautchariyakul, Chotima Yamee, Cherdchan Pothichaiya, and Hervé Bocherens: New fossil and isotope evidence for the Pleistocene zoogeographic transition and hypothesized savanna corridor in Peninsular Thailand. Quaternary Science Reviews, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2019.105861
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Hervé Bocherens
Universität Tübingen
Fachbereich Geowissenschaften – Paläobiologie
Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (HEP)
+49 7071 29-76988
herve.bocherens @uni-tuebingen.de
Dr. Kantapon Suraprasit
Stipendiat der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung
Universität Tübingen
Fachbereich Geowissenschaften – Paläobiologie
+49 7071 29-72493
suraprasit @gmail.com
Contact for press:
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
Public Relations Department
Dr. Karl Guido Rijkhoek
Director
Janna Eberhardt
Research Reporter
+49 7071 29-76753
Fax +49 7071 29-5566
janna.eberhardt @uni-tuebingen.de
www.uni-tuebingen.de/en/university/news-and-publications.html