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Indonesia was considered to be an important island that allowed human species to spread from Asia into other areas now known as Papua New Guinea and Australia 50,000 years ago. However, the stone tools unearthed on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia suggests otherwise. Apparently, we are not the only species that came to this island, braving the ocean. According to the findings, a mysterious specie of early humans were inhabited by this island 194,000 years ago, going back at least tens of millennia before arrival of our own species, reports Daily Mail

These tools, shaped into sharp blades, were discovered at four sites in Talepu, Indonesian jungle by the Walanae River. The new discovery makes an interesting revelation that an earlier specie, much before us, lived on this island and perished before homo sapiens arrived. Writing in the journal Nature, Dr. Gerrit van den Bergh, an anthropologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia who led the research, since no human remains were found, it is difficult to tell exactly what species made the tools. According to Dr. Gerrit and his team of researchers, these could have been so-called Hobbits or Homo Floresiensis, 3-ft tall ancient humans who were discovered to have lived near the island of Flores, 190,000 years ago. They are also speculated to be Homo Erectus whose remains have been discovered in present day Java.

Dr van den Bergh and his colleagues said: "From our Talepu excavation results it is now possible to conclude that the initial peopling of Sulawesi took place at least 118,000 years ago. The identity of these early inhabitants is of considerable interest given previous assumptions that Sulawesi was only ever colonized by Homo sapiens, and currently thought to have arrived in the region by around 50,000 years ago. Our findings at Talepu attest to the presence of early tool-makers on Sulawesi by the late Middle Pleistocene, but the absence of Pleistocene human fossils on the island precludes a definitive answer as to which hominin species was first to make landfall," reported Daily Mail