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A Painted Stone Reached Wetar Island Before Pottery Did
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A Painted Stone Reached Wetar Island Before Pottery Did

What a small red plaque from a cave in eastern Indonesia says about what Austronesian voyagers actually carried across the Pacific.

A flat stone sits in the sediment of Huknaur rockshelter on Wetar Island, in the deep waters east of Timor. On its surface, someone painted a design in red pigment: concentric circles ringed by lines radiating outward, like a sun sketched by a child, except this one is roughly 4,000 years old and was made by someone whose ancestors had recently crossed …

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