page_title: History of Malaysia
section_title: Prehistory
hierarchical_section_title: History of Malaysia / Prehistory
caption_attribution_description: English: Barbara Harrisson, behind the Niah Skull, December 27, 1958.
context_page_description: Malaysia is located on a strategic sea-lane that exposes it to global trade and various cultures. Strictly, the name "Malaysia" is a modern concept, created in the second half of the 20th century. However, contemporary Malaysia regards the entire history of Malaya and Borneo, spanning thousands of years back to Prehistoric times, as its own history, and as such it is treated in this page.
  An early western account of the area is seen in Ptolemy's book Geographia, which mentions a "Golden Khersonese," now identified as the Malay Peninsula. Hinduism and Buddhism from India and China dominated early regional history, reaching their peak during the reign of the Sumatra-based Srivijaya civilisation, whose influence extended through Sumatra, Java, the Malay Peninsula and much of Borneo from the 7th to the 13th centuries.
  Although Muslims had passed through the Malay Peninsula as early as the 10th century, it was not until the 14th century that Islam first firmly established itself. The adoption of Islam in the 14th century saw the rise of a number of sultanates, the most prominent of which were the Sultanate of Malacca and the Sultanate of Brunei.
context_section_description: Stone hand-axes from early hominoids, probably Homo erectus, have been unearthed in Lenggong. They date back 1.83 million years, the oldest evidence of hominid habitation in Southeast Asia. The earliest evidence of modern human habitation in Malaysia is the 40,000-year-old skull excavated from the Niah Caves in today's Sarawak, nicknamed "Deep Skull". It was excavated from a deep trench uncovered by Barbara and Tom Harrisson (a British ethnologist) in 1958. this is also the oldest modern human skull in Southeast Asia. The skull probably belongs to a 16-to 17-year-old adolescent girl. The first foragers visited the West Mouth of Niah Caves (located 110 kilometres (68 mi) southwest of Miri) 40,000 years ago when Borneo was connected to the mainland of Southeast Asia. The landscape around the Niah Caves was drier and more exposed than it is now. Prehistorically, the Niah Caves were surrounded by a combination of closed forests with bush, parkland, swamps, and rivers. The foragers were able to survive in the rainforest through hunting, fishing, and gathering molluscs and edible plants. Mesolithic and Neolithic burial sites have also been found in the area. The area around the Niah Caves has been designated the Niah National Park.
  A study of Asian genetics points to the idea that the original humans in East Asia came from Southeast Asia. The oldest complete skeleton found in Malaysia is 11,000-year-old Perak Man unearthed in 1991. The indigenous groups on the peninsula can be divided into three ethnicities, the Negritos, the Senoi, and the proto-Malays.  The first inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula were most probably Negritos. These Mesolithic hunters were probably the ancestors of the Semang, an ethnic Negrito group who have a long history in the Malay Peninsula.
  The Senoi appear to be a composite group, with approximately half of the maternal mitochondrial DNA lineages tracing back to the ancestors of the Semang and about half to later ancestral migrations from Indochina. Scholars suggest they are descendants of early Austroasiatic-speaking agriculturalists, who brought both their language and their technology to the southern part of the peninsula approximately 4,000 years ago. They united and coalesced with the indigenous population.
  The Proto Malays have a more diverse origin and had settled in Malaysia by 1000 BC as a result of Austronesian expansion. Although they show some connections with other inhabitants in Maritime Southeast Asia, some also have an ancestry in Indochina around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum about 20,000 years ago. Anthropologists support the notion that the Proto-Malays originated from what is today Yunnan, China. This was followed by an early-Holocene dispersal through the Malay Peninsula into the Malay Archipelago. Around 300 BC, they were pushed inland by the Deutero-Malays, an Iron Age or Bronze Age people descended partly from the Chams of Cambodia and Vietnam. The first group in the peninsula to use metal tools, the Deutero-Malays were the direct ancestors of today's Malaysian Malays, and brought with them advanced farming techniques. The Malays remained politically fragmented throughout the Malay archipelago, although a common culture and social structure was shared.
caption: The discovery of a skull which estimates say is around 40,000 years old on Niah Caves in Sarawak, has been identified as the earliest evidence for human settlement in Malaysian Borneo.
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