Ancient Indonesian woman reshapes views on spread of early humans

Iwan Sumantri, an archaeology and anthropology lecturer at Hasanuddin University, holding a part of Besse's skeleton at the university's laboratory, in Makassar, Indonesia, on Sept 18, 2021. - Reuters

MAROS, Indonesia (Reuters): Genetic traces in the body of a young woman who died 7,000 years ago furnish the first clue that mixing between early humans in Indonesia and those from faraway Siberia took place much earlier than previously thought.

Theories about early human migration in Asia could be transformed by the research published in the scientific journal Nature in August, after analysis of the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), or the genetic fingerprint, of the woman who was given a ritual burial in an Indonesian cave.