Technologies of the first Homo sapiens communities in Sri Lanka: Arrows, ochre, and monkey hunting

Archaeologists contend that it was our aptitudefor symbolic, technological, and social behaviors that was central to Homosapiens rapidly expanding across the majority of Earth’s continents duringthe Late Pleistocene. This expansion included movement into extremeenvironments and appears to have resulted in the displacement of numerousarchaic human populations across the Old World. Tropical rainforests arethought to have been particularly challenging and, until recently, impenetrableby early H. sapiens. In this presentation, evidence for bow-and-arrowhunting toolkits alongside a complex symbolic repertoire from 48,000 yearsbefore present at the Sri Lankan site of Fa-Hien Lena—some of the earliestbow-and-arrow technology outside of Africa. As one of the oldest H. sapiensrainforest sites outside of Africa, this exceptional assemblage provides thefirst detailed insights into how our species met the extreme adaptivechallenges that were encountered in Asia during global expansion.