An Ice Age savannah corridor let large mammals spread across Southeast Asia
(PHYSorg.com Archaeology & Fossils)

New research from the University of Tübingen indicates that the Thai-Malay Peninsula-where parts of Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand are located-was at least partly an open savannah during the Ice Age, when the peninsula was part of a much larger land now known as the Sunda Shelf. It is likely to have provided a corridor for large mammals from mainland Asia to reach today`s islands of Sumatra, Borneo and Java for the first time, between 120,000 and 70,000 years ago. That is the conclusion reached by Dr. Kantapon Suraprasit, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Tübingen and a lecturer at Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), and Professor Hervé Bocherens of the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen, working with other Thai researchers. The team carried out isotope analyses on the teeth of Ice Age mammals found on excavations in the region. Scientists have long hotly debated how animals and early humans migrated between the mainland and the islands of Southeast Asia. These latest findings strengthen the hypothesis that a savannah corridor existed during the Ice Age, giving humans and animals relatively easy passage to the south and east from mainland Asia. The study has been published in Quaternary Science Reviews.