The Lost Forest
Page 37
Chapter 37
THE CHOSEN PEOPLE
Abe Avner complained of stomach problems and feverishness. Ennis was not very kind to him; he suspected it was nothing but a strong dose of diarrhoea. Avner was not used to the tropics and even less the rain forest and once the excitement of this new world had worn thin he had not ceased to complain. Each day spent by the ancient limestone cliffs that rose from the river became hell for Avner, he preferred press conferences in grand hotels and first class flights and three day weeks, each on a different continent. In recent times he had put on weight though he had started to shed it fast.
Avner was out of condition, it was perhaps his first on-site working expedition since his reknowned discovery in Israel many years before, where he had stolen the limelight from his collegue, Dr Shlomo Wald, releasing details of their find to the world press, fixing, forever, his own name to their joint discovery, to the chagrin of Wald and the Israeli authorities.
‘It’s probably some of the meat from those little black pigs our chef slipped into the dinner last night that’s upset you,’ said Pierre, getting a sneaky pleasure from provoking Avner.
Avner shook his head; he was too insensitive to see the jibe.
‘A shot of whisky is what would do you good.’
Avner perked up at the suggestion, he was a believer in the medicinal value of alcohol, especially Pierre’s good Scotch whisky.
‘Some of us here know very little about early man in Israel, Abe,’ said Pierre finding a glass and pouring him a good three fingers full. ‘Why don’t tell us a little about your work?’
‘Why not,’ he said looking a little more cheerful, ‘we’ll have to go back a couple of hundred thousand years, when the population of the world was just over a million, including Homo erectus and the Neanderthals, and when Homo sapiens appeared on the scene. It was another hundred thousand years before Homo sapiens left the African continent, and just a few family groups crossed into the Sinai and Israel.’
‘The Chosen People!’
‘Yes, in a manner of speaking, because in just another 60,000 years Homo sapiens sapiens had conquered the entire planet, reaching Australia and the Americas, supplanting all other forms of man on his way.’
‘Didn’t any of the other forms of man survive?’ asked Collin Williams. “I mean until recently?”
‘Yes, the Neanderthals lingered on, for example the fossils I discovered in Israel date fossil date from between twenty and thirty thousand years ago. But, the Neanderthals and others could have well continued to survive for much longer but for the moment we simply haven’t found his bones.’
‘Maybe we have!’
‘Not in Israel.’
‘There’s other places Abe!’
‘In any case the chances that all of those other million or so early men disappeared simultaneously is very unlikely. We’ve seen large native populations wiped out by new arrivals, in America and Australia. Though in most other places the populations resisted the new comers, in China or Japan for example, or they survived in their isolation...Eskimos, Dayaks and Papuans.’
‘Which brings us back to borneensis!’
‘Yes, but that’s all very interesting and philosophical,’ said Ennis, ‘the urgent problem now is both the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia want the paternity of borneensis, which is also the paternity of humanity as we know it, if Professor Murtopo’s theory is proved right.’
‘It would certainly be an enormous satisfaction to Mahatir,’ said Avner grimly, ‘he would like to have his revenge on the Jews and all other scapegoats who are supposed to have put his people down.’
Murtopo was one of the leading Indonesian palaeo-anthropologists, who like Avner tended to confuse man’s origins with national or even racial pride, he was not the first, many Europeans and Americans had preceded him, but even serious anthropologists such as Charlton Coon had often been accused of racist ideas in their works.
‘So you see nothing is new!’
‘So they weak were pushed into the forest?’
‘Certainly, more primitive hominids, Asian forms of erectus, like Solo Man, who we know for certain had already lived there on Java half a million years ago, before being replaced by more evolved versions of hominids who had trekked across Asia out of Africa.’
How and when that happened was uncertain. The volcanic activity of Java was the most intense on the planet, its volcanoes had spewed out fire and death for millions of years and it was a real possibility that early men were wiped out by a volcanic disaster such as occurred at Toba in Sumatra. Almost eighty thousand years ago the explosion of the super volcano, Mount Toba, had an effect on a planetary scale wiping out a great number of the larger mammals over a radius of several hundreds of kilometres, causing a fall in temperature as the planet was covered with a cloud of dust and a catastrophic winter, depriving plants of life and men and animals of food
Ennis was peeved by Avner’s somewhat conceited attitude and his habit of grabbing attention at every opportunity, though in general he had to admit Abe, in spite of himself, could be unwittingly amusing company. The real question however, was to prevent Avner from pulling off the same trick he had played in Israel, once he was back in Tel-Aviv.
In the meantime they had to concentrate on getting deeper into the caves to see what other discoveries remained. It was important to explore all galleries before they left the site, since once the discovery became public the government would seal the cave and probably put Murtopo in total charge.
There was also the unresolved territorial question, according to the survey carried out by PT Indosatmap; the southern entrance was clearly situated on Indonesian soil. However, doubts remained as to whether the northern entrance lay on the Sarawak side of the border or on the Kalimantan side. Several hundred metres of tunnels and galleries connected the narrow entrance through which Ennis had first penetrated in the cave complex, to the cavernous rock shelter on the Kalimantan side of the mountain. It was a problem that could only be resolved by the inter-governmental frontier commission, which was not about to meet and ponder such delicate questions with economic and political crises wracking the region.
The chaotic state of Indonesia was a serious problem, even though the authorities had laid claim to what was a national heritage, it would not be long before tourists arrived not to speak of ignorant and unscrupulous treasure hunters arrived attracted the prospect of easy money. Local tribesmen from would be only too happy to sell old bones for a few dollars to antique dealers from Pontianak.
The pressure on President Suharto grew as rioting mobs rampaged through the streets setting Jakarta aflame. At the same time the rich and privileged trembled, they had long considered themselves invulnerable above the struggling masses of Java. The rumour had started making the rounds that Suharto would step down in favour of the Vice-President Jusef Habibie. Habibie was a member of the presidential clique, a life long political crony, and just as deeply involved in the tentacular business of the first family, riddled with graft and corruption.
Suharto, an army general, had risen to power in 1966, and had been elected president two years later, he was serving his seventh, five-year term of office. Habibie, an eccentric German-trained aerospace engineer, owed his position to the patronage of President Suharto. When questioned by journalists on the economic crisis and his country’s future Habibie replied, ‘You know, if you are swimming and you are surrounded by sharks, you have to swim, otherwise you will be eaten by the sharks. And I’m not going to be eaten by the sharks. I am going to swim and bring my country out of this problem.’
He had been Minister of Science and Industry for over twenty years, backing ambitious and sometimes useless or extravagantly expensive national projects including a fully Indonesian passenger plane.
It was also Habibie who had enthusiastically endorsed the French led expedition to West Kalimantan sponsored by Aris, easing the way for the issue of permits for archaeological exploration and scientific investigati
on, sponsoring a joint team of Indonesian specialists led by Professor Murtopo.
Reports also circulated of new factory closures and bankruptcies, thousands were marching through Jakarta’s business district chanting, ‘Hungry, hungry.’ Things were beginning to look dangerous and the shadow of chaos fell across the archaeological expedition.
At the remote site work continued as usual, nothing had changed, but the City of Pontianak had been transformed into a state of anarchy with daily riots as the police and army looked on. The supply line for the expedition ran through Pontianak and the question of evacuation was posed daily as news from the capital grew worse.
Crowds assembled outside of the Central Bank waving rupiah notes, the national currency, that had fallen almost eighty percent against the dollar, as mobs burnt shops and killed Chinese.
Under pressure from world opinion and the mob, Suharto finally forced to step down, with Habibie acting as interim President, in the hope that the crisis would be defused, and new elections could be organised. However, the promised elections were fraught with danger as the opposition in the form of the Muslim leader Wahid and the daughter of Indonesia’s president, Megawati Sukarno, struggled to build the forces against Suharto’s powerful supporters.
The immensely rich Chinese business establishment and the first family had held the country in an iron grip, with the civil service acting as their agents for rich rewards. The staff of government ministries, departments and state owned industries, amongst which was the Ministry of forests and its timber operations, could not support their life styles with their miserable government salaries.
Men like Adyatman, lived on graft, driving Cherokee Jeeps, living in fine villas situated in the capital’s wealthy suburbs, their children at expensive universities in the USA and Europe, had official salaries of less than one thousand US dollars a month. They lived in fear that the status quo would be destroyed and they would find themselves on the streets as economic refugees struggling to make a living like the masses they despised.
Such people were subsidised by industrialists, including the logging companies and forestry based industries that paid them richly for their services, which consisted of attributing the same company’s valuable forestry concessions and logging permits for the prized timber of the primary forest. First felling hardwood giants for immensely profitable export timber and plywood, then clear-cutting the remainder of the forest for pulp wood. Finally, the clear-cut areas were ploughed for the planting of palm oil and cash crops.