The discovery of just a few stone flakes on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, has had an enormous impact on how archaeologists view the movement of early humans throughout island Southeast Asia. The seven pieces of flaked stone discovered at the Calio site were found within layers of fossils dating back at least 1.04 million years, while other models suggest these layers might date even further back, to 1.48 million years ago, which represents an almost million-year difference compared with earlier discoveries from the island of Sulawesi.
Prior to the Calio site, the earliest signs of hominins on the island were found at the Talepu site, estimated at around 194,000 years old. This implied that humans arrived at Sulawesi in the Middle Pleistocene; however, the new dating of the Calio site shifts everything to an entirely new level. First of all, the importance of the discovery lies not only in terms of Sulawesi but also goes beyond it since the island belongs to the zone of Wallacea, which means that it is cut off from other regions by deep water, making it impossible for early humans to walk across even during lower sea levels. According to PubMed, the Calio research shows that hominins likely migrated to the island around the same time that many other islands in Southeast Asia were colonized.
