| Abstract: |
Since the 1990, many human fossils have been recovered in Java, especially during excavations made in the Gunung Sewu area ("Thousand Hills", Southern Mountains of Java). The new Holocene fossil <i>Homo sapiens</i> are of capital importance. Discovered during systematic excavations, in well-defined stratigraphical and cultural context, they come to fill significant gaps in the Indonesian human fossil record. Morphological and morphometrical features of cranio-dental remains point to a probably very large biological diversity of these populations. This assumption seems to be also highly supported by the analysis of funerary behaviours developed in this paper. For this period, all the main funerary modes are documented (primary burials, secondary burials, cremation). According to these new data, there is no clear visible chronological trend, unlike for instance the hypothesis claiming that flexed burials in Indonesia. Thus, for the considered time period, our results contrast to some extent with previous palaeoanthropological models of settlements and migrations in Southeast Asia, which were in fact based on a very limited number of fossils. We prefer to consider insular Southeast Asia as a crossroads of human migrations (i.e. an "actual zone of human hybridization") at least as of the end of the Upper Pleistocene. These early groups of <i>Homo sapiens</i> certainly played an important role in the so-called "ethnogeneses of people in Indonesian archipelago".
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