News Anthropology

A drowned landscape held clues to the lives of ancient human relatives

More than 6,000 animal — plus two Homo erectus — fossils came from the seafloor off Java

This image shows three rows of fossilized bones on a black background, including ones that came from ancient elephant-like and hippo-like creatures.

Geologist Harold Berghuis collected more than 6,300 animal fossils from an artificial island in the Madura Strait. The fossils, including some shown here from elephant-like and hippopotamus-like creatures, are helping to re-create what a landscape now drowned by the sea once looked like.

Harold Berghuis

By Michael Marshall

A construction project in Southeast Asia dredged up the remains of the extinct human relative Homo erectus from the seabed.