The Wajak crania (also Wadjak, following the Dutch spelling of the toponym) are two fossil human skulls discovered near Wajak, a village in Tulungagung Regency, East Java, Indonesia (then

Dutch East Indies The Dutch East Indies, also known as the Netherlands East Indies ( nl, Nederlands(ch)-Indië; ), was a Dutch colony consisting of what is now Indonesia. It was formed from the nationalised trading posts of the Dutch East India Company, which ...

) in 1888/90. The first was found on 24 October 1888 by mining engineer B.D. van Rietschoten who sent it to paleontologist Eugène Dubois who subsequently found the second skull in September 1890. When returning to the Netherlands in 1895, Dubois took the skulls with him. They are now located in

Naturalis Naturalis Biodiversity Center ( nl, Nederlands Centrum voor Biodiversiteit Naturalis) is a national museum of natural history and a research center on biodiversity in Leiden, Netherlands. It was named the European Museum of the Year 2021. Alth ...

, Leyden. Dubbed Wajak Man, and formerly classified by Dubois as a separate species (''Homo wadjakensis''), the skulls are now recognized as an early anatomically modern human fossil. They were dated to the early-to-mid Holocene (12,000 to 5,000 years ago) in the 1990s, but a 2013 study revised the date to between 28,000 and 37,000 years ago. Their morphological characteristics have been described as showing affinity to both proto-Australoid (intermediate between Solo Man and contemporary

Australo-Melanesians Australo-Melanesians (also known as Australasians or the Australomelanesoid, Australoid or Australioid race) is an outdated historical grouping of various people indigenous to Melanesia and Australia. Controversially, groups from Southeast Asia an ...

) and to Mongoloid populations, specifically

Chinese people The Chinese people or simply Chinese, are people or ethnic groups identified with China, usually through ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, or other affiliation. Chinese people are known as Zhongguoren () or as Huaren () by speakers of s ...

, sharing specific Mongoloid traits such as flat face. Some anthropologist argue that a population related to the Wajak crania may be ancestral to both Mongoloid and Australo-Melanesian populations, with the Wajak crania representing a link between these populations. Anthropologist such as Bulbeck and Turner concluded, based on these and other findings, that "southern Mongoloids" are indigenous to Southeast Asia, with the proto-Mongoloid population to have originated in the Sunda region or Mainland Southeast Asia, while their distant relatives, the Australo-Melanesians originated in the Sahul region with at least 50,000 years of divergence. Anthropologist Paul Storm argues that "the most likely interpretation is to consider the Wajak skulls as Mesolithic robust representatives of the present inhabitants of Java",

Javanese people The Javanese ( id, Orang Jawa; jv, ꦮꦺꦴꦁꦗꦮ, ''Wong Jawa'' ; , ''Tiyang Jawi'' ) are an ethnic group native to the central and eastern part of the Indonesian island of Java. With approximately 100 million people, Javanese people ...

References

{{reflist *Storm, P., "The evolutionary significance of the Wajak skulls", ''Scripta Geol.'' 110 (1995) 1-247. *Strom, P., Nelson, A. J., "The many faces of Wadjak Man", ''Archaeology in Oceania'', Volume 27, Issue 1 (April 1992), 37-46
doi:10.1002/j.1834-4453.1992.tb00281.x

External links

"Wadjak man"
Merriam-Webster Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens fossils Peopling of Southeast Asia Archaeology of Indonesia

See also

References

External links