Every month, tens of thousands of tourists descend on Nusa Penida clutching cameras and snorkel gear, drawn by the cliffside drama of Kelingking Beach and the graceful company of manta rays. What almost none of them realize is that far below the turquoise water they are paddling through, an underwater cave in Bali’s Nusa Penida is quietly upending what scientists thought they knew about ancient human life in this part of the world.
The site is called Song Toyapakeh, and its existence is forcing researchers to ask harder questions about who lived here, how far back that story goes, and what the ocean floor is still hiding.
The Underwater Cave That Was Once a Campsite
A scientific paper published in ScienceDirect in 2023, titled “New evidence on prehistoric settlement in Song Toyapakeh, an underwater cave in Nusa Penida, Bali,” has only recently begun filtering into broader public awareness, thanks largely to findings shared by Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency, BRIN. The delay between publication and public attention is itself telling, a reminder of how slowly archaeological revelations travel from academic journals to the places they describe.
The most striking thing about this underwater cave in Bali’s Nusa Penida is not what it contains, but what its very existence implies. Researchers have concluded that Song Toyapakeh was once entirely above sea level, part of a terrestrial landscape where prehistoric humans and animals moved freely. What submerged it was not catastrophe but time, specifically the dramatic rise in sea levels that followed the end of the last ice age, a process that swallowed coastlines, valleys, and, in this case, an entire cave system that people once called home.
Inside the cave, researchers working in 2021 recovered fossilized remains belonging to a proboscis monkey, a turtle, a cervical deer, and what appear to be deliberately shaped stone artifacts, sharp-edged tools resembling arrowheads or spearheads that strongly suggest human craftsmanship. These are not random fragments. Together, they paint a picture of a place where people once lived, hunted, and sheltered, before the ocean slowly erased all evidence of their presence above the waterline. BRIN notes that the cave contains fossilized bones including a lower jawbone of a proboscis, a sacrum of a turtle, a femur of a cervical, and a shoulder blade of a proboscis, a collection diverse enough to suggest this was an active, inhabited environment rather than an isolated burial or ritual site.
What This Underwater Cave Reveals About Ancient Migration
Perhaps the most consequential implication of the Song Toyapakeh discovery is what it says about ancient geography. Researchers now believe this underwater cave in Bali’s Nusa Penida sits along what was once a land corridor connecting Bali and Lombok, a natural bridge that prehistoric humans used to migrate eastward through what is today called the Wallacea region, the chain of islands between the Asian and Australian continental shelves.
This matters because Wallacea has long been considered a formidable barrier to human migration. The deep ocean trenches running through this zone, sometimes called the Wallace Line after the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, were thought to have required open-water crossings that early humans were unlikely to have managed easily. Song Toyapakeh complicates that picture significantly, suggesting the geography itself was far more permissive than modern maps imply. If a land bridge once connected Bali and Lombok through this area, the story of how humans spread through Southeast Asia and toward Australia may need substantial revision, pushing timelines back and opening new questions about routes that have since disappeared beneath the waves.
The cave is not just a local curiosity. It is a data point in one of archaeology’s most debated conversations, the question of how and when modern humans dispersed across the Pacific world.
A Discovery With Global Significance, Hidden Beneath a Tourist Hotspot
What makes the Song Toyapakeh cave particularly remarkable is where it sits, directly beneath one of Bali’s most visited and photographed islands. Nusa Penida has built its reputation on surface-level beauty, the vertiginous cliffs, the coral gardens, the manta rays. Yet beneath that postcard scenery, this underwater cave in Bali’s Nusa Penida has been preserving evidence of human prehistory that no one thought to look for until recently.
There are already scientists in multiple disciplines who argue that the origins and spread of human life trace back further, and follow more complex routes, than prevailing evidence has so far confirmed. The Song Toyapakeh site adds weight to that argument. It also raises an uncomfortable but important point: if a cave of this significance was sitting undiscovered beneath one of the world’s most-visited island destinations, what else remains unexamined beneath the seas of Southeast Asia?
Tourism, Preservation, and a Difficult Balance
BRIN marine archaeologist Gendro Keling has framed the site’s potential carefully, acknowledging both its scientific value and its appeal as a future destination. He has described Nusa Penida as a leading marine tourism destination in Bali and suggested that Song Toyapakeh has the potential to enrich that profile through underwater tourism with historical and archaeological themes, while stressing that development must be research-based and directly involve local communities.
For now, the underwater cave in Bali’s Nusa Penida remains closed to the public, and that restriction is appropriate. Submerged archaeological environments are among the most fragile on earth. Sediment disturbance, anchor damage, and even the bubbles from scuba equipment can degrade irreplaceable material in ways that are impossible to reverse. The fossils and artifacts inside Song Toyapakeh survived thousands of years beneath the sea partly because nothing disturbed them. Managed incorrectly, a single season of diver traffic could undo what the ocean spent millennia preserving.
The challenge facing Indonesian heritage authorities is one that archaeologically rich destinations around the world wrestle with constantly. Visibility and access generate the funding and political will needed to protect a site, but they also introduce the very pressures that endanger it. Getting that balance right at Song Toyapakeh will require institutional patience that is not always easy to maintain in a fast-growing tourism economy.
What Visitors Can Explore on Nusa Penida Right Now
For travellers visiting Nusa Penida today, Song Toyapakeh itself remains off limits. But the island’s connection to deep human history is not entirely inaccessible. Goa Giri Putri Temple, built within one of the largest cave systems on the island, offers a genuinely extraordinary window into the relationship between this landscape and the people who have considered it sacred for centuries. Accessed by a long staircase that descends into the earth, the temple complex is open to visitors of all faiths who observe Balinese Hindu customs, including wearing a sarong and sash.
Few tourists make the effort, which is their loss. The cave temples of Nusa Penida are not decorative additions to a beach holiday. They are part of a continuous thread of human presence on this island that, thanks to the underwater cave in Bali’s Nusa Penida, now stretches back further than anyone had previously documented. Visiting Goa Giri Putri is one way to stand inside that history while Song Toyapakeh remains protected beneath the waves.
The tourists paddling above the cave each day are, without knowing it, floating over one of the most significant prehistoric sites in Southeast Asia. That is the kind of detail that has a way of permanently changing how a place feels.
Sources & References
- ScienceDirect, New evidence on prehistoric settlement in Song Toyapakeh, an underwater cave in Nusa Penida, Bali
- National Research and Innovation Agency of Indonesia (BRIN), Song Toyapakeh Underwater Cave Research Findings
- Smithsonian Magazine, The Wallace Line and Human Migration Through Island Southeast Asia
- UNESCO, Underwater Cultural Heritage Protection and Management Guidelines
- Journal of Human Evolution, Sea Level Changes and Prehistoric Human Migration in the Indo-Pacific
About the Author
This article was produced by a senior journalist at Things To Do In Kuta Bali specializing in archaeology, heritage tourism, and the intersection of ancient history with contemporary travel. With over a decade covering Southeast Asian culture and environmental affairs, the author has reported from Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Philippines, with a particular focus on how newly discovered archaeological evidence reshapes national and regional identity narratives.
