Abstract: |
Information on late Pleistocene <i>Homo sapiens</i> in Indonesia is very limited and the age of the latest occurrence of <i>Homo erectus</i> is fiercely debated (Swisher et al., 1996, GrĂ¼n and Thorne, 1997 and Storm, 2001). The presence of hominins in the Javanese Punung assemblage has been noted previously (von Koenigswald, 1939 and 1), but no description or specific identification of the hominin specimens was made and the exact provenance of the material was unclear, as the site information was lost. In this paper, we describe a hominin fossil associated with a tropical rainforest assemblage from Java. Not only have we relocated the original sites mentioned in earlier reports (von Koenigswald, 1939 and 1) as yielding faunal and hominin remains, we have also discovered a third site yielding in situ fossils strongly indicative of a rainforest fauna. These discoveries provide important information bearing directly on these debates and uncertainties.
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