Liang Bua

Liang Bua ( " cold cave ") is the name of a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, in which the first fossils of Homo floresiensis were discovered in 2003.

The cave is located 14 kilometers north of Ruteng and 25 kilometers from the north coast of the island, about 500 meters above sea level, on a slope about 30 meters above the river Wae Racang. It is approximately 30 meters wide, 25 meters high and up to 40 meters deep. The cave was formed underground around 600,000 years ago as a washout in a karst formation from the Miocene. Your northern end was demolished only around 190,000 years ago by the once higher up river, then up to eleven meters thick layers of material have been entered from the field over the millennia. At the bottom are conglomerates of round cut stones, demonstrating that it is deposits of the river. The sediments overlying consist partly of clay, but partly also from sintering and volcanic ash, which can be used for dating of fossils.

First excavations in the Liang Bua cave in 1965 performed the Catholic priest and historian Theodor Verhoeven. Verhoeven had the cave in 1950 met when she was still used as an elementary school. " When he started in 1965 with excavations, he found people from graves recently and fossils of the species endemic to Flores rat Paulamys, " also a collection of stone tools; his discoveries in this cave, however, were not published. Further excavations found only from 1978, 1981, 1982, 1985, 1987 and 1989 held under the leadership of the Indonesian archaeologists RP Soejono, the Verhoeven had reported in a letter from his excavations in 1973. Soejenos excavations sent further Neolithic graves free and reached a maximum depth of 4.20 meters, which corresponds to an age of 10,000 years BP layer.

2001, the exploration of the cave by an Australian -Indonesian team led by Mike Morwood ( University of New England ) and Thomas Sutikna (Indonesian Centre for Archaeology, Jakarta ) was resumed. The aim of this new excavations was (probably Homo erectus ) to secure evidence for an early settlement of the island of Flores by members of the genus Homo, whose existence was on the island with up to 840,000 years old stone tools.

Except Homo floresiensis were in the Liang Bua cave, among other numerous remains of an unusually small Stegodon ( Stegodon florensis insularis ) and found by Komodo dragons, which is attributed to the influence of Homo floresiensis. For different horizons Fund, whose oldest at least 95,000 years old, also came to light numerous stone tools, the - point to a history of settlement until the 20th century - together with 7000-3000 year-old bones of farm animals and other, younger dated finds.