News and Views Late Pleistocene Homo sapiens in a tropical rainforest fauna in East Java Paul Storm a, * , Fachroel Aziz b , John de Vos a , Dikdik Kosasih b , Sinung Baskoro b , Ngaliman b , Lars W. van den Hoek Ostende a a National Museum of Natural History, Postbus 9517, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands b The Geological Museum, Jl. Diponegoro 57, Bandung 40122, Indonesia Received 17 February 2005; accepted 1 June 2005 Keywords: Homo sapiens; Pongo pygmaeus; Tropical rainforest; East Java Introduction Information on late Pleistocene Homo sapiens in Indonesia is very limited and the age of the latest occurrence of Homo erectus is fiercely debated (Swisher et al., 1996; Gru¨n and Thorne, 1997; Storm, 2001). The presence of hominins in the Javanese Punung assemblage has been noted previously (von Koenigswald, 1939; Badoux, 1959), but no description or specific identification of the hominin specimens was made and the exact provenance of the material was unclear, as the site information was lost. In this paper, we describe a hominin fossil associated with a tropical rain- forest assemblage from Java. Not only have we relocated the original sites mentioned in earlier reports (von Koenigswald, 1939; Badoux, 1959) as yielding faunal and hominin remains, we have also discovered a third site yielding in situ fossils strongly indicative of a rainforest fauna. These discoveries provide important information bearing directly on these debates and uncertainties. East Javanese sites with a tropical rainforest fauna The first reports of fossil rainforest faunas on Java came in the early 1930s when von Koenigs- wald and Tweedie, surveying the region of Pacitan and Punung, East Java, found two sites with mammal fossils in karstified hills, but failed to record the exact location of the sites. In 1935e 1936, von Koenigswald excavated one of these sites west of Mendolo Kidul, which is now known as Punung I (Badoux, 1959; Bosscha Erdbrink, personal communication 1 ). Later, in 1938, * Corresponding author. E-mail address: oermens@hetnet.nl (P. Storm). 1 Personal communications took the form of 1) a letter from D.P. Bosscha Erdbrink to P. Storm, dated November 27, 1997, and 2) copies of photographs taken by D.P. Bosscha Erdbrink (in June 1936 and April 1938) with text, given to P. Storm on December 6, 1998. 0047-2484/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2005.06.003 Journal of Human Evolution 49 (2005) 536e545