| Abstract: |
Being a land bridge between mainland Southeast Asia and the Indonesian Archipelago, the island of Sumatra, by its geographical position, has played an important part in the human settlement of Indonesia. Since the ancient prehistory, Man has crossed the old sub-continent Sundaland and went inevitably through the Island of Sumatra before reaching Java. The first migrants, Homo erectus, the Hoabinhian foragers as well as the first farmers, all of them, from the ancient Palaeolithic until the Neolithic periods, have left behind them the splendid remains of their stone implements. We will discuss here the significance of these stone tools which are important landmarks in time and space, and which inform us about the prehistory and the ancient techniques of this still mostly unknown island. In the first place, this contribution reviews the history of discoveries in Sumatran prehistory from the beginning during the colonial period until the present. In the second place, we will present the new discoveries resulting from our recent fieldwork in order to try to give some new insights about the knowledge of the cultural sequences in the prehistory of this vast and forgotten island.
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