The Incredible Human Journey
Page 13
And so we left Kampong Air Bah and the Lenggong Valley. Stephen had made a trip to the country and people he loved, and was returning with a fridgeful of new DNA samples. And I’d learnt a huge amount in just a few days, about surviving in a rainforest, trying to keep a threatened culture alive and the ivy branches that lay across South-East Asia. My next step would take me to another bit of Malaysia, but, this time, on an island.
Headhunting an Ancient Skull: Niah Cave, Borneo
So on I flew, to the Malaysian state of Sarawak on Borneo, and headed once more into the rainforest. Niah Cave is part of a system of caverns in the Gunong Subis limestone massif, about 15km from the coast in Sarawak. The cave lies within a national park, and we stayed at the park lodges. To get to the cave, I took a ferry across the Niah River and then walked 3.5km on boardwalks through the jungle to the cave itself.
I was excited by the prospect of visiting Niah; it was one of the places that had been on my wish list when we first started planning the series. It seemed like some archetypal archaeological site: a magnificent, vast natural cave in a mythical landscape of towering limestone escarpments, in the rainforest. And it was one of the most famous archaeological sites in South-East Asia.
Tom Harrison, then Director of Sarawak Museum, had excavated Niah between 1954 and 1967, with his wife Barbara. His first experience of Borneo had been on an ornithological expedition to the island, as an undergraduate, in 1932. He had gone there to study birds, but ended up becoming fascinated with the culture of the Dayak headhunters of Borneo, and this was the beginning of his career as an anthropologist. During the Second World War, Harrison had parachuted into the Borneo rainforest as part of a mission to recruit the native inhabitants of Borneo against the Japanese. Rather gruesomely, he successfully resurrected the practice of headhunting. Harrison stayed in Borneo until the Japanese surrendered – and beyond. After the war, he took up the post of Director of the Sarawak Museum. Tom Harrison knew of the very ancient human remains found on Java, the Homo erectus specimen that became known as ‘Java Man’, and he started digging at Niah Cave in search of ‘Borneo Man’.1
I approached the cave through the massive, open rockshelter known as the Traders’ Cave, where twentieth-century gatherers of swiftlet nests would sell their strange harvest to soup makers. There are still nest collectors working the cave today. From the Traders’ Cave, I ascended wooden steps which then became an arched boardwalk, and suddenly, I was in front of the enormous West Mouth of the Great Cave of Niah. It was huge: 60m high and 180m across. I had seen photographs of it but, even so, I wasn’t prepared for the sheer scale of it. I could make out wooden poles hanging from the ceiling of the cave, and I watched a nest collector climb first a knotted rope, then up a pole, to the high ceiling of the cave. He threw down swiftlet nests to his colleagues below, small, plastic-looking cups, with feathers embedded in the dried saliva. Not an appetising prospect. In recent years, nest collecting had reached such a frenetic level that the swiftlet population had dived; now the collectors are working within strict quotas, but it still seemed cruel and unnecessary, like so many luxury foods. The nest collectors, though, made good money from this bizarre Chinese delicacy.
Tom Harrison found plenty of evidence of early human use of Niah Cave, including many burials from the Neolithic, dating to between 2500 and 5000 years ago.2 I walked around the site of Harrison’s excavations in the West Mouth of the cave. The original trenches have been left open, and many Neolithic burials still lie exposed. This was quite strange: archaeologists normally remove human skeletal remains because, although bones may have survived for thousands of years, uncovering them changes their environment and they are likely to degrade. Certainly, these Neolithic burials looked a little the worse for wear. Tall trees had been cleared from the cave mouth of Niah, allowing light in for tourists to appreciate the sweeping grandeur of the enormous cavern. But light had also enabled green algae to grow across the limestone walls and ceiling of the cave, and all over the Neolithic burials.
But I hadn’t come to see Neolithic burials: they were far too recent. Below the Neolithic cemetery, just within the West Mouth and cutting down through pond sediments, was Harrison’s 25ft-long Hell Trench. This part of the excavation gained its name from the conditions in which the archaeologists were working: hot, humid and hellish. But the swelteringly hard work in this trench paid off, when, in 1958, Tom Harrison discovered the ‘Deep Skull’. It was unmistakably a modern human, with a round braincase, and modern-looking browridges and occiput. From its depth, he must have anticipated that it would have been old. There was charcoal in the layer of sediment immediately above the skull, which Harrison sent off to be radiocarbon dated. When he got the results back, it transpired that he had found what was, at the time, the earliest evidence of modern humans outside Africa: the skull appeared to be 40,000 years old.2 At the time, this date was met with disbelief: it seemed far too early a date for a modern human in Borneo.
The skull itself was normally kept in the Sarawak Museum in Kuching, but the curator, Ipoi Datan, had very kindly arranged to bring the skull back to its original findspot, and so I was to see the skull in the cave in which it was found. I carefully opened its cardboard box. The skull had been in many fragments when it was discovered, but had been glued together to make larger pieces. I carefully lifted these pieces out of the cotton wool that had cushioned them on the motorbike ride into the forest. There was a large domed piece that made up most of the calvarium, or top of the skull, a fragment of the left temporal bone, around the left ear, and another fragment of the base of the skull. The maxilla, with the upper teeth, had been left behind in Kuching, but I knew from the reports that the third molars or wisdom teeth had not erupted. This meant that this was the skull of a young person, in his or her late teens or early twenties. The base of the skull also showed signs that two of the bones had been in the process of fusing – at a joint with the grand name of the ‘spheno-occipital synchondrosis’ – another indication that this was the skull of a young adult.
It can be quite difficult to decide if a young skull like this is male or female. Many of the features that indicate maleness relate to the robusticity or chunkiness of a skull (as men are generally more muscly and heavily built than women), but these features are often still developing into a young man’s twenties. Many eighteen-year-old men still look quite girlish, although they may baulk at this. I really notice the difference, teaching at a university, between male students in the first and third year. They grow up in all sorts of ways, but their faces really do change over those three years. The Deep Skull looked female to me, but I had to bear in mind that this was the cranium of a young adult, and so I couldn’t be sure. Other researchers had reported the skull as ‘probable female’.
The square shape of the eye sockets, wide nose, slightly protruding jaw and the shape of the teeth fitted very well with what the researchers expected ancient South-East Asians – the ancestors of present-day Andaman Islanders, and Aboriginal populations throughout Malaysia, the Philippines and Australia – to have looked like.2
Harrison had never published a full report on the site, and, in 2000, an international team of archaeologists, led by Graham Barker from Cambridge University and Ipoi Datan, who had brought the skull from the Sarawak Museum for me to examine, descended on Niah Cave.3 Their mission was to recover information from the trenches, notebooks, photographs and excavated material from the original dig, and to carry out some new excavation as well. Harrison’s 40,000-year-old date for the Deep Skull had always been controversial. Some archaeologists had suggested that his dating was flawed, others that the skull could have been much more recent, perhaps even Neolithic, and that it had somehow been pushed down into deeper sediments, making it seem much older than it really was.
So one of the key challenges for Barker and his team was to find out if the skull really was as old as Harrison had claimed. Going back to Hell Trench, they were able to confirm the exact place where the Deep Skull had be
en discovered. It was clear to them that the skull could not have been pushed down into the sediments in which it was found. They then applied new dating techniques on the sediments in which the skull had been found, using state-of-the-art AMS radiocarbon dating on charcoal from the sediment, and uranium series dating on the bone itself. The new dates for the Deep Skull came out at around 39,000 to 45,000 years old, so Harrison’s claim for the great antiquity of the skull was vindicated.
There are a couple of other sites in the region with very old fossils. The Tabon Cave on the island of Palawan in the Philippines, just north of Borneo, has yielded a skull dated to around 17,000 years, but also a tibia which could be as old as 58,000 years, although this date needs to be confirmed.4 A premolar – possibly that of a modern human – from Punung on Java may be even older.5 Late Palaeolithic archaeological sites in Korea have been dated to 42,000 years ago, and there are some modern human remains from cave sites that have been estimated, by dating of associated remains, to be around 40,000 years old.6 But the Deep Skull remains, fifty years after its discovery, the earliest definite evidence of modern humans in South-East Asia, and among the oldest outside Africa.2
The re-excavation of Niah Cave also turned up more human bone, including a fragment of tibia and pieces of another skull. These other skull fragments were stained with ochre on the inside surface, leaving archaeologists to wonder whether it had been painted as part of a burial ritual, or even perhaps used as a paintpot.
As well as skeletal remains of the early people of Niah themselves, there was plenty of evidence of how they had lived, and the dates for human occupation of the cave went back even earlier than the Deep Skull. One of the important implications of findings from Niah Cave is that these hunter-gatherers were managing to survive in an environment that may look green and lush on the surface but is actually very difficult to find food in. Many plants that look quite palatable are actually poisonous, and the animals get very good at hiding in dense foliage. I had already seen the skills and knowledge needed by modern hunter-gatherers to obtain wild food in the Malaysian rainforest, and in Niah Cave there was evidence of the same sort of ingenuity and resourcefulness going back some 46,000 years.
Barker’s team analysed a huge volume of animal bone left over from Harrison’s excavations, giving them insights into the diet and hunting skills of the early occupants of Niah Cave. The animal bones came from layers dated to between 33,000 and 46,000 years ago. Many of the bones were burnt, probably the dumped remains of turned-out hearths – a bit of Palaeolithic housekeeping – while others had cut marks on them from butchery, so the archaeologists could be sure that humans had been involved. It seemed that the hunter-gatherers at Niah were managing to catch an enormous range of prey, from many different habitats around the cave: the bones belonged to a many different species including bearded pigs, leaf monkeys and monitor lizards.
Some of these animals wouldn’t have proved too much of a challenge; molluscs could have been easily harvested from rivers and swamps, and modern hunters in the tropics have been reported taking porcupines, pangolins, monitor lizards and turtles simply by hand. I could believe this having seen the Lanoh girls plucking slippery fish out of Air Bah River.
Monkeys, though, are more difficult to hunt. The presence of monkey bones in the Niah Cave sediments showed that the humans were able to successfully hunt tree-living animals. There was no direct evidence to show that those hunter-gatherers had projectile technology, but, from what they were eating, they must have done. I thought back to the Lanoh’s blowpipes: entirely made out of organic material, they wouldn’t survive in the ground for very long. Anything made of bamboo or wood would be invisible to archaeologists looking for clues thousands of years later. It brought it home to me how incredibly difficult it is trying to find out what someone’s lifestyle was like when all that’s generally left are a few pieces of stone and bone.
The antiquity of both blowpipes and of the bow and arrow is still up for debate. There is no evidence of either being used this early, but this has to be balanced against the knowledge that most organic remains will have entirely perished. The earliest definite evidence for bow and arrow use comes from Europe, just 11,000 years ago, although some archaeologists argue that it may have been invented much earlier.7 Bone and cartilage points were found at Niah, and it is possible that these may have been used as arrowheads.
The butchered pig bones in the cave also pointed to fairly sophisticated hunting technology – and a fondness for pork. Traditional ways of hunting pigs in modern Malaysia include using dogs and spears, blowpipes, bows and arrows, as well as ambushing and trapping. Dogs can be ruled out, as they were brought to Borneo only in the Neolithic. The other methods cannot be discarded, but without more archaeological evidence we can really only speculate about how those hunter-gatherers went about acquiring their game.
There were so many pig bones in Niah Cave that the archaeological team doing the twenty-first-century reassessment of the cave suggested that pig-hunting may have been the main reason that humans were drawn to the area. The bones were analysed to determine the age of the pigs being eaten: two-fifths of the bones to juvenile pigs. In modern Malaysia, pig populations boom and bust, following fluctuations in the fruiting of abundant tropical trees called Dipterocarps (from the Greek for two-winged fruit), which are themselves linked to weather cycles in the southern hemisphere. In years with bountiful fruit, wild pig populations can increase up to ten times in just a few months, and all that reproduction means a greater proportion of juvenile pigs around. Perhaps it was during these ‘good pig years’ that bands of hunter-gatherers would have set up seasonal camps in the mouth of Niah Cave, feasting on pork.3
The monkey bones at Niah Cave also served as clues to what the environment would have been like at the time. They indicated that the area around Niah was forested, and this was corroborated by analysis of pollen in the Hell Trench sediments, which showed cycles of alternating mountainous and lowland rainforest. At around 40,000 years ago the environment would have been humid lowland rainforest, patchier than today as the climate was drier, although there would still have been plenty of rain.2,8 The middle of OIS 3, between 40,000 and 47,000 years ago, was an especially warm and wet period.6 I visited Niah Cave in the middle of the wet season; there were frequent downpours in the afternoon, and, as I sat in the cave, keeping dry and looking out at the drenched rainforest, I imagined those early hunter-gatherers doing the same. When the rain stopped, the heat quickly lifted moisture from the trees to form wreaths of mist on the steep, forested slopes opposite the cave mouth.
It also looks like the hunter-gatherers knew how to make the most of rainforest plants as well, and had learnt to detoxify yams so that they were edible. Raw yam (Dioscorea hispida) is poisonous enough for a few mouthfuls to kill an adult, but yam fruit and seeds can be detoxified and made safe by burying them for a couple of weeks, then boiling them, or by burying the seeds for a longer period with ash. Barker’s team found pits containing ash and nut fragments, and inferred that the ancient hunter-gatherers may have been using the pit method of detoxification. There were also suggestions that the foragers had been managing the forest, using fire to clear areas: the archaeologists found particularly high levels of Acanthaceae (Justicia) pollen, which is among the first plants to recolonise fire-cleared areas in contemporary forest. In fact, there is evidence for wide use of burning of areas of dense wet tropical forest in South-East Asia between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago.8
In recent history, hunter-gatherer tribes in South-East Asia were nomadic, forced to move around seasonally in order to exploit the thinly spread resources of the rainforest. From the evidence in Niah Cave it looks as though the ancient foragers were also roaming around, but returning again and again to the cave, which provided them with a base from which they could make forays out in search of food. Most of the evidence of human activity in the cave is in the form of the animal bones left after dinner. There are very few stone tools in the cave, but,
as those that have been found were made of stone originating about 50km away, it makes sense that the hunter-gatherers wouldn’t have carelessly discarded tools when they left the cave. A few bone tools were also found in the archival material from Harrison’s dig, from the 33,000- to 46,000-year-old layer, in among the butchered animal bones. There were six pieces of worked bone, including one that had been sharpened to a point to form an awl or hole-making device.3 Bone tools are seen as one of those things that characterise the Upper Palaeolithic, traditionally considered part of a more sophisticated technology and culture that emerged with the Aurignacian in Europe about 40,000 years ago. However, we have already seen that this apparent ‘revolution’ may have had its roots much earlier, in Africa, and that the first humans leaving Africa may have already been making sophisticated tools, including mounting bone points on shafts.
Although there were no refined stone tools, or evidence of ornament or art, comparable to the European Upper Palaeolithic, Barker argued that the ingenuity, resourcefulness and forward-planning implied by the archaeology at Niah show just as ‘modern’ an approach to life. The foragers of Niah were certainly displaying an ability to exploit a great range of resources: they were probably trapping animals, using some sort of projectile technology for hunting, detoxifying yams and clearing areas of forest using fire. The ability to survive in the rainforest would have helped humans spread through South-East Asia, but they were not alone in the region; as they spread, they would start encroaching on the territories of earlier humans.2