The Incredible Human Journey

by Alice Roberts

  On the raft we all put life jackets on and paddled with renewed energy. Sumbawa was so close now that we could make out sandy beaches. It looked as if there were plenty of places to land the raft. Although we were trying to direct the raft, we were really at the mercy of the currents, which became unpredictable as we neared land. Robert kept reassessing our position in respect of which bit of beach we were headed for, and we paddled accordingly. As we got closer, we could even see some houses – a little fishing village perhaps – along the beach we were approaching. The end was in sight. After about nine hours of paddling, fatigue was setting in, but there was an air of relief pervading the crew. The fishermen sang songs to help the paddles through the water, and, when they stopped, I taught them old Scout songs that my dad had taught me as a kid. ‘We’re riding along on the crest of a wave’ went down well, but not as well as ‘Gingangooly’, which they all thought was hilarious. Especially when I told them, via Tokyo, that it didn’t even mean anything in English.

  As we continued on our course, we started to enter a bay with a long headland just to the south of us, and I spotted some very large breakers peeling off it towards us. I pointed at the waves and made wide-eyed faces and the fishermen laughed. They weren’t worried a bit – we were far enough away from them – then it gradually became apparent that we weren’t getting any closer to the shore. We were paddling very hard, but staying opposite the same part of the headland. Then, suddenly, we moving closer and closer to the rocky headland and backwards – right towards those breakers. We were caught in a very strong rip current, and there was absolutely nothing we could do. I radioed the support vessels, which were keeping a close eye on us now, while staying a safe distance from the breakers themselves. We stopped paddling and let the current take us – not into the breakers, but right back out to sea again. It was as though Sumbawa had lured us in and then spat us back out.

  The current was now taking us south, down the coast of Sumbawa, so the idea of landing on the first beach we had spotted was abandoned. As we rounded the headland, we could see a row of small beaches separated by rocky spurs. Any one of them looked like a good landing site, if it hadn’t been for the almost continuous reef break flanking them. We needed to find a gap in the break that matched up with a beach – but there wasn’t one for a good two more kilometres down the coast. We were all very tired by now.

  But we paddled on. We had come so far, it was impossible to imagine doing anything but finishing the trip, and by landing the raft, not abandoning it. Then we got stuck again: we had been paddling past the same headland (or trying to) for half an hour. Dusk was fast approaching, and it was clear that we would have to elicit some help from the twenty-first century. One of the support boats came up and we threw them a line, and were towed a few hundred yards, out of the rip.

  And there it was: a gap in the breakers. Paddling furiously, we negotiated our way through unbroken waves, with great barrels of white water crashing down either side of us, but just running out before they got to us. It felt as if the raft was heaving itself over the waves, and you could see the whole thing twisting and bending as it rode the swell. But – it rode it. As we neared the shore, we were into smaller breakers, with waves rushing up between the bamboo and soaking us. We all stayed on the raft and continued paddling, until we were well into the shallows. Then everyone leapt off, and tried to manoeuvre the suddenly very unwieldy and dangerously heavy craft up and on to the beach. Safely on the sandy beach, I actually jumped up and down and hugged Robert Bednarik. It had taken us ten hours and twenty-five minutes. We had made it: our Palaeolithic voyage had been successful.

  It had been an amazing experience. Most of the journey had been extremely easy – much more so than I’d expected. But in those last two hours it was as though the sea had decided to remind us who was boss. We had certainly proved the principle: that it’s possible to cross open sea on a bamboo raft made with stone tools, without a sail or a motor. It did make me wonder about the intention behind those early voyages, though. Just as we had been taken by currents and swept down the Sumbawa coasts, perhaps rogue currents had carried early fishermen, plying their craft along the coast, to new lands. The prevailing winds and currents between Indonesia and Australia would certainly have facilitated such an unintentional trip. Equally, those natural forces would have favoured a deliberate crossing, just as they do today: illegal immigrants can make their way from Timor to the Kimberley coast in three days, in motorless craft with small sails. Simulation studies suggest that the colonisation of Sahul would have been more purposeful than the old ‘pregnant woman aboard a log’ scenario, and that founding populations probably had some contact with parent populations.14 Several researchers have argued that the most likely scenario was a process of disorganised colonisation, with numerous small bands of people from various Wallacean islands arriving in dribs at drabs, at many points along the northern Sahul coast at different times.8,10

  What would they have found when they got there? They would have landed on a great coastal plain, some 200km wide. The vegetation may have been quite familiar to humans from the Wallacean islands. There was an expansion of tropical forest in Australia during OIS 3, peaking around 50,000 years ago,15 but the animals would have been distinctly unfamiliar: strange-looking marsupials which had evolved along their own routes, in that isolated continent. Most of those animals would have been the marsupials still existing in Australia today, but others were truly monstrous: they included a giant constrictor, Wonambi naracortensis, an enormous carnivorous lizard, Megalania prisca, a huge emu-like bird, Genyornis newtoni, a rhinoceros-sized marsupial, Diprotodon optatum, and the 3m-tall giant kangaroo, Procoptodon goliah. Those giant ‘megafauna’ have all become extinct, and their demise seemed to coincide all too neatly with the arrival of humans.10

  It was time to make that journey to Australia myself.

  Footprints and Fossils: Willandra Lakes, Australia

  I flew over miles and miles of red land, criss-crossed by straight roads. It was immense, empty and dry. I flew into Mildura, a strangely cosmopolitan town in the middle of a semi-desert, late in the afternoon. That evening, I met up with archaeologist and Mungo National Park officer, Michael Westaway, along with a team of archaeologists who had arrived from various corners of Australia to revisit the lakes.

  The following day, we piled our gear into Land Rovers and drove 113km north-east, and were very quickly on dusty, unsurfaced roads in a desert-like environment. The three Land Rovers kicked up a great cloud of dust behind them.

  After a few hours we turned off the road and drove down a hill on to a flat plateau. Most of the drive had been over a low-lying landscape, with gentle rises and dips, so the hill was quite strange, and once we had driven down it I could see that it was actually part of a long, curved ridge stretching off into the distance, like a white wall in an otherwise featureless landscape. We pulled up at a cluster of low buildings: we had arrived at Mungo National Park Visitor Centre.

  Michael Westaway pointed out the ridge that I had spotted as we approached, and told me that it was called the ‘Walls of China’. It may have been named by Chinese labourers who had worked on the sheep farm in the nineteenth century. The odd feature curved right around us, in a wide sweeping arc. There is no water in the Willandra Lakes system today: it all dried up thousands of years ago. What I was looking at on the horizon, that curving ridge, was a prehistoric lake shore. The flat plain was the dry lake bed. And then, among the scrubby bushes, I spotted my first kangaroo.

  The Willandra Lakes system includes the dried-up relicts of nineteen interconnected lakes, including Lake Mungo, where the Visitor Centre was situated. I was rather confused about the history of the lakes: they had been wet for much of the Ice Age, and were dry now, which seemed the wrong way round. I was used to the broad concept of things being generally, globally, drier during glacial periods, with lower sea levels when so much water was locked up as ice, and conversely wetter, with higher sea levels during warmer perio
ds, when the ice melted. But local geography is also important: during the Ice Age, the lakes were fed by run-off from the glaciers of the Eastern Australian Highlands. It seems that, when the world warmed up, the glaciers melted away, and, by about 18,000 years ago, with no water left to feed the lakes, they dried up.1

  I stayed in the lodge at the Visitor Centre, situated between a small museum and an old shearing shed. My room was basic but comfortable, containing the essentials for a good night’s sleep in the middle of Australia: a bed and an air conditioner. There was another building containing a kitchen and a dining room, where someone had painted an enormous kangaroo on the wall, about 3m tall. This was an artist’s impression of Procoptodon goliah. It wasn’t the most accomplished painting I had ever seen, but, rather unnervingly, its eyes did follow you around the room.

  So, had the earliest Australians killed off these ancient beasts? It seems that humans and megafauna may have co-existed in Australia for 10,000 years, if not more. Some researchers think that the megafauna were hunted to extinction – although there are no megafauna kill-sites to support this argument. Others have suggested that climate change was the real killer, with the cold dryness of the LGM finishing off the huge Pleistocene animals of Australia. But recent dating of fossil megafauna suggests that many species of megafauna became extinct across Australia between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago – at least 20,000 years before the LGM. So these dates do suggest that humans might have had something to do with it, either killing off the giant beasts directly or else by disrupting the ecosystem in some way.2 Some archaeologists believe that there is another indication of human impact on the environment at just this time, with a decline in forest starting around 45,000 years ago, linked to burning of large areas,3,4 but it’s impossible to know if it was people who started the fires.

  The next day we set off again and ventured on to even rougher tracks, winding through the bush until we reached the site where the archaeologists had converged. They had come on a conservation mission: to check the preservation of the Willandra footprints. And these were very precious footprints: they were around 20,000 years old. Several Aboriginal elders were there at the site as well, overseeing the operation. Some of the younger archaeologists were themselves Aboriginal people, trained to recognise archaeological features in the landscape and to look after their own heritage. The footprints themselves were found, in 2003, by a young Aboriginal woman, on an archaeological training day. Steve Webb, an anthropologist from Bond University in Robina, Queensland, had been taking a group of trainees on a field-walking exercise, teaching them how to recognise ancient artefacts and features. They had actually ended up in the wrong area, but Webb had decided it was as good a place as any just to do some training. Then one young woman, twenty-six-year-old Mary Pappin Junior, spotted a footprint. Webb realised that this couldn’t have been a recent footprint: it had been buried under sediments, and revealed by the wind blowing away the sand over a much harder surface. And there were more: in all, eighty-nine footprints had already been revealed by natural erosion.

  When the site was excavated, more footprints were found: 563 of them, over an area of 850m2 .5 The prints were preserved in a layer of very hard, silty clay. When they were made, the clay must have been moist, perhaps soon after rain. Then it dried hard before being covered by windblown sand. Twenty thousand years later, the wind was undoing its work and revealing these usually ephemeral traces. But the same wind was also threatening to destroy the exposed prints, literally sand-blasting them away.

  ‘Once the site was excavated and exposed to elements, it almost immediately started to deteriorate,’ Michael told me. ‘First it was sandblasted by the wind, and then it suffered a nasty freeze-thaw event. We watched the footprints change before our eyes – over just a few months.’

  The archaeologists had to come up with a plan to preserve the precious trackways; they decided to cover the prints back up, with 65 tonnes of sand, pinning a fabric membrane over the surface of the sand to stop it blowing away. But before they did this, they made a record, by digitally scanning the whole site.

  The archaeologists had come back to assess how well the conservation plan was working, and I was extraordinarily lucky to be visiting the site when this health check of the footprints was being carried out. In any other week of 2008 I would have seen only the membrane covering the site. But there I was, watching the archaeologists cutting neat holes in that protective fabric and carefully digging and sweeping out the sand from a few chosen footprints.

  ‘We’re reopening just a few of the prints to see if the weight of that sand is distorting the footprints,’ said Michael. The re-exposed footprints certainly looked good to me: the toes were clearly defined, and you could even see where the muddy clay had squelched up between them.

  I had seen some ancient footprints before, on the coast of Formby in north-east England, but these Australian prints were much, much older. Footprints can be very useful from an archaeological, anthropological point of view. The very ancient footprints from Laetoli in Tanzania have been useful in reconstructing the way australopithecines walked – and indeed, prove that they did walk on two legs.

  Footprints of early modern humans tell us where people were, and a little about past societies and social behaviour. But I actually think most of the ‘scientific’ information to be gleaned from them is fairly obvious stuff: people in the past (including children) walked or ran, in straight or curving lines. You can work out stature, too. Not exactly mind-blowing. Although, rather strangely, there is one rather intriguing trackway at Willandra that appears to be that of a one-legged man – moving at some speed!

  But, to my mind, the footprints do something more than just provide us with data: they link us back to long-forgotten people in a very personal way. They are records of a brief moment in someone’s life. There is something quite profound about looking at something which is usually such a fleeting sign of another human’s presence, and knowing, without a shadow of a doubt, that a person walked just there, where you are standing, all those thousands of years ago.

  So how, you may be asking, did those archaeologists manage to date those footprints? The answer: OSL. By taking samples from the sediment just under and just above the footprints, and using optically stimulated luminescence to measure the amount of time that quartz grains had been buried for, an age range could be determined. The footprints had been made some time between 19,000 and 23,000 years ago.1

  So what had those prehistoric Aboriginal people been doing there? It looks like there was a group of people, of different ages, moving around the margins of the lake, and precisely what they were up to as they made those footprints we can only guess. But we do know that, at the time, the lakes would have been a good place for hunter-gatherers to hang out, with plenty of fish, shellfish, waterbirds and game to hunt.1

  But it was a rare combination of factors that meant that their footprints had lasted until the present.

  ‘We don’t find footprints all over Australia, and the preservation of the footprints here is still a bit of a mystery – but there would seem to be a couple of favourable factors here,’ explained Michael. ‘One factor is the clay itself: it contains a mineral called magnesite, which is fairly rare, and seems to help mould the footprints perfectly. And the clay must have been wet when the people walked across it. Then, soon after, windblown sand covered the footprints over – and locked them in for some twenty thousand years.’

  For Michael and the other archaeologists who had come up with the conservation plan, it was looking very reassuring. On site, they were able to compare the re-exposed footprints with photographs from the original excavations. It looked like very little deterioration had occurred: the sand and membrane were definitely doing their job. They had also brought along a laser scanner to take detailed scans of the footprints, to compare with scans taken when the prints were first exposed. Once each of the six or seven exposed footprints had been scrutinised, photographed and scanned, they were carefully cov
ered up again with sand, and the membrane drawn back over and secured with cable ties.

  There is other, more ancient evidence of humans living around those lakes. In fact, Willandra Lakes were famous long before the footprints were discovered. In 1968, the remains of a cremated skeleton were found, eroding out of the dunes that fringe Lake Mungo. Geologist Jim Bowler and his colleagues had been collecting shells and stone tools from the Walls of China, and had found a collection of burnt bone fragments that he first thought were the remains of some early Australian’s dinner. But, on further inspection, it looked like the bones could in fact be human.

  The archaeologists had been expecting to work on surface finds and now they had an excavation on their hands. They collected up the loose pieces of bone, then removed a block containing bones which had been naturally cemented together with calcium carbonate or calcrete. The specimens were carried off site in a suitcase.

  In the lab, anthropologist Alan Thorne carefully removed the calcrete from the bones using a dental drill; they were definitely human. The fragments represented the remains of two individuals, named, rather predictably, ‘Mungo I’ and ‘Mungo II’. Number two consisted of just a few fragments. Mungo I was also fragmentary, but there were enough pieces – about 25 per cent of a skeleton – to be able to tell that these were the cremated remains of a lightly built young woman. The skull was fragmentary, but what was there looked similar in many ways to modern Aboriginal Australians.

  Careful analysis of the bones provided some insight into the funerary ritual. The body had been burnt while still complete, but the bones of the spine and the back of the head had largely escaped the flames of the pyre. After the cremation, the bones had been smashed up, a funerary practice which was still happening in Australia and Tasmania until quite recently. The bone fragments had then been scooped into a shallow pit at the lakeside. Initial radiocarbon dating of shells associated with the cremation suggested it could be around 30,000 years old: the oldest human remains to be found in Australia at that time.6