Fragments of a human skull could hold clues to an ancient lost land.
Researchers have discovered 140,000-year-old Home erectus skull fragments buried in a now-submerged land in Indonesia.
The team accidentally found the fossils after sand and silt dredged up thousands of animal bones in the Madura Strait, the sea channel between Java and Madura Island.
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Now, the team believes this could be the first evidence of human activity on the prehistoric landmass known as Sundaland, Live Science reports.
Published in the Quaternary Environments and Human journal, the new study suggests that a previously unknown group of Homo erectus may have coexisted - and possibly copied hunting techniques.
Marks on the skull and nearby animal fossils hint that this Homo erectus group targeted large prey, including an ancient, cow-like animal.
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From this, the scientists believed they were copying humans from the mainland.
"The Madura Strait hominins may have developed this hunting strategy independently," said Harold Berghuis, the lead author of the study at the University of Leiden, Netherlands. "But the other possibility is that we are looking at a kind of cultural exchange."
Moreover, the findings suggest that early humans lived alongside 36 animal species including Komodo dragons, Ancient bovids, elephants, water buffalo, river sharks and hippos.
“This was not a barren or remote outpost,” Berghuis added. “It was a lush, resource-rich environment where early humans thrived.”
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The researchers reportedly recovered over 6,000 animal fossils from the Sundaland seabed.
During the last Ice Age, when human ancestors roamed this land, this area would have looked entirely different.
“This discovery paints a vivid picture of a thriving ecosystem and an intelligent, adaptive Homo erectus population,” explained Berghuis.
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Surprisingly, the discovery almost never happened after a massive construction project started in the strait. Between 2014 and 2015, 177 million cubic feet of material from the strait to build an artificial island near Surabaya. Berghuis spent weeks scouring the site and his relentless pursuit ended in a groundbreaking victory on his last day on the island.
"It was already getting dark and I sat down to enjoy [the] sunset," Berghuis said. "And then, right beside me, lay this fossil that reminded me so much of the only Dutch Neanderthal. This is a well-known fossil in my country, dredged from the North Sea."
Homo erectus is known as the first human ancestor to develop a body similar to ours and the first to migrate out of Africa into Asia and Europe. This find sheds new light on early human life that once thrived in Sundaland.