World's oldest high-altitude settlements 'found in PNG'
AFP The world's oldest known high-altitude human settlements, dating back up to 49,000 years, have been found sealed in volcanic ash in Papua New Guinea mountains, archaeologists said Friday. Researchers have unearthed the remains of about six camps, including fragments of stone tools and food, in an area near the town of Kokoda, said an archaeologist on the team, Andrew Fairbairn. "What we've got there are basically a series of campsites, that's what they look like anyway. The remains of fires, stone tools, that kind of thing, on ridgetops," the University of Queensland academic told AFP. "It's not like a village or anything like that, they are these campsite areas that have been repeatedly used." Fairbairn said the settlements are at about 2,000 metres (6,600 feet) and believed to be the oldest evidence of our human ancestors, homo sapiens, inhabiting a high-altitude environment. "For homo sapiens, this is the earliest for us, for modern human