Prehistoric Indonesia

This is mostly because Indonesia's geographical conditions as a vast archipelago caused some parts — especially the interiors of distant islands — to be virtually isolated from the rest of the world.

West Java and coastal Eastern Borneo, for example, began their historical periods in the early 4th century, but megalithic culture still flourished and script was unknown in the rest of Indonesia, including in Nias and Toraja.

The Papuans on the Indonesian part of New Guinea island lived virtually in the Stone Age until their first contacts with modern world in the early 20th century.

Geologically the New Guinea island and the shallow seas of Arafura is the northern part of Australia tectonic plate and once connected as a land bridge identified as Sahulland.

The rise of sea surface created isolated areas that separated plants, animals and hominid species, causing further evolution and specification.

In 2007 analysis of cut marks on two bovid bones found in Sangiran, showed them to have been made 1.5 to 1.6 million years ago by clamshell tools, and is the oldest evidence for the presence of early man in Indonesia.

Fossilised remains of Homo erectus, popularly known as the "Java Man" were first discovered by the Dutch anatomist Eugène Dubois at Trinil in 1891, and are at least 700,000 years old, at that time the oldest human ancestor ever found.

[10] In 2011 evidence was uncovered in neighbouring East Timor, showing that 42,000 years ago these early settlers had high-level maritime skills, and by implication the technology needed to make ocean crossings to reach Australia and other islands, as they were catching and consuming large numbers of big deep-sea fish such as tuna.

The descendants of the pre-Austronesian inhabitants of the Indonesian Archipelago are still the majority in the eastern portion of the region, in islands such as New Guinea, the Maluku and East Nusa Tenggara.

The second is a less common style of cave art, characterized by images drawn of larger, naturalistic profile paintings of wild land mammals that were endemic to the island during the Pleistocene period, such as miniature buffalos and warty pigs.

[17] On 11 December 2019, a team of researchers led by Dr. Maxime Aubert announced the discovery of the oldest hunting scenes in prehistoric art in the world which is more than 44,000 years old from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4.

Archaeologists determined the age of the depiction of hunting a pig and buffalo thanks to the calcite ‘popcorn’, different isotope levels of radioactive uranium and thorium.

[18][19][20][21] On 16 March 2020, a team of archaeologists led by Griffith University has uncovered the first known examples of ‘portable art’, which are probably 14,000 - 26,000 years old, from a limestone cave named Leang Bulu Bettue in Sulawesi and published in the academic journal Nature Human Behaviour.

[25][26][27][28] Ornaments made from bones and teeth of babirusa deer-pig and bear cuscuses (Ailurops ursinus) marsupial, was unearthed from limestone caves in Sulawesi.

[13][12][30] Austroasiatic people spread via Indochina, from Yunnan in Southern China to Vietnam and Cambodia, then to the Malay Peninsula before finally arriving in Sumatra, Borneo and Java.

The contesting suggestion argues for Austroasiatic-Austronesian admixture — which probably took place in the Malay Peninsula or southern Vietnam, intermixing there before continuing to western Indonesia.

[34] The Punden step pyramid is believed to be the predecessor and basic design of later Hindu-Buddhist temples structure in Java after the adoption of Hinduism and Buddhism by the native population.

Dong Son culture spread to Indonesia bringing with it techniques of bronze casting, wet-field rice cultivation, ritual buffalo sacrifice, megalithic practises, and ikat weaving methods.

These reverence among others are evident through the harvest festivals that often invoked the nature spirits and agriculture deities, to the elaborate burial rituals and processions of the deceased elders to preparing and sending them to the realm of ancestors.

The prehistoric spirit of ancestors or nature that possess supernatural abilities is identified as hyang in Java and Bali, and still revered in Balinese Hinduism.

The human livelihood of prehistoric Indonesia ranges from simple forest hunter-gatherer equipped with stone tools to elaborated agriculture society with grain cultivation, domesticated animals, with weaving and pottery industry.