Stone Cooking Contributed to Palaeolithic Modern Humans' Maritime Adaptation around Wallacea

HOSAKA Yasuo1*, SHODA Shinya2, NAKAZAWA Yuichi3, YAMAZAKI Shinji4, FUJITA Yuki5, ISHIHARA Yoshiro6, KANAI Takuto7, MATSUMOTO Kengo8, KUNITAKE Sadakatsu2, Hasanuddin9, Syahruddin Mansyur9, and ONO Rintaro10

Stone Cooking was an important food preparation method, along with pottery and open-fire cooking, and its traces have been found in Palaeolithic sites around the world, and it is entirely possible that stone cooking was used in various places as anatomically modern humans spread globally. In particular, it is worth exploring the possibility that stone cooking contributed to Palaeolithic humans' adaptation to the marine environment in Wallacea, which stretches from Southeast Asia to Australia and Oceania. To answer this question, this presentation first discusses visual identification methods for burnt limestones. We have confirmed the presence of burnt limestones in strata dating back 20,000 years at the Sakitari-do Cave site in Okinawa, and in strata dating back 40,000 years at the Topogaro Cave site on the central coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia. We also report that the presence of burnt limestones was confirmed in the early Holocene strata of Topogaro and Baloya caves, located on the west coast of Selayar Island, Indonesia. Also, we present the methods for lipid residue and use alteration analyses carried out on the burnt stone findings. This presentation examines the significance of the use of burnt stones from the late Pleistocene to early Holocene in the Wallacea region and discusses the possibility that stone cooking may have contributed to modern humans' maritime adaptation.