Ancient Peoples Transported Wallabies to the Indonesian Islands by Canoe

Dating back either 12 or 800 years ago, wild wallabies were caught and transported by canoe to nearby islands located dozens of kilometers away.

The Sahuru natives—a group of marsupials from a prehistoric landmass that eventually broke into Australia and New Guinea—likely accompanied human explorers and traders to the islands in Southeast Asia, providing food, decorative fur, and tools made from bones. This animal import is recognized as one of the earliest known instances of animal translocation, with established colonies thriving over millennia, according to Dylan Gaffney at Oxford University.

“This aligns with a broader understanding of how early humans managed, transported, and raised animals more deliberately than previously assumed. They didn’t merely endure in these tropical environments; they actively transformed them,” says Gaffney.

Research pertaining to species translocation typically prioritizes European explorers, who notably introduced invasive rabbits to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries and reintroduced horses to the Americas in the late 1400s and early 1500s.

However, in the 1990s, two types of marsupial bones were identified—Phalanger Orientalis Breviceps or Phalanger Breviceps, along with Bandicoot bones (Echymipera Kalubu)—from the Eastern Islands of New Guinea, and Brown Forest Wallabies (Dorcopsis Muelleri) found on an island west of Halmahera, roughly 350 km from Sahuru’s ancient shores.

Based on the age of nearby charcoal remains and the sediment layers, research teams estimate that the Wallabies arrived around 8,000 years ago, while other species date back to between 13,000 and 24,000 years ago.

The specifics of how these animals arrived on the islands remain unclear—whether by human transport or natural means. To explore this, Gaffney and his colleagues examined a new archaeological site in Indonesia’s Rajaanpat Islands.

There, thousands-of-years-old skeletons indicate that the colony of brown forest wallabies thrived on the island about 4,000 years ago, though the reasons behind this are still uncertain.

Radiocarbon dating in a cave inland revealed evidence of wallabies being hunted and cooked as far back as 13,000 years ago, further supported by findings from another island to the west that dates back 5,000 years.

The team also uncovered several bone tools utilized in hunting and textile work, suggesting human activity at least 8,500 years ago.

In investigating how these animals arrived on distant islands, the team employed computer modeling that accounted for the sea levels and environmental conditions of that era.

This modeling supports the theory that humans transported the animals via canoes, Gaffney explains. Without human assistance, Wallabies would have struggled to survive the treacherous oceanic journey that could have lasted over 24 hours, relying on vegetation rafts for days to reach the islands. While swimming to nearby islands is conceivable, it’s uncertain whether forest wallabies (modern or ancient) possessed the ability to swim.

In contrast, canoe trips would have taken only a few hours to a couple of days, a timeframe that likely would have been manageable for breeding animals.

These findings underscore a sophisticated understanding of species movement by humans well before the era of European colonial expansion. Tom Matthews, who was not involved in the research and is from the University of Birmingham, UK, states, “We frequently assume that these introductions began within the last 500 years, but the evidence indicates that humans were reshaping their ecosystems long before then.”