Chapter 54
SUPER VOLCANOES
Man’s very survival is remarkable compared to the destructive forces of nature. The islands that constitute Indonesia form a region that is particular propitious to the diversity of life but it also an extraordinarily dangerous region Lake Toba in Sumatra, over one hundred kilometres long and twenty-five wide, is evidence of the explosion of a super volcano and the collapse of its caldera, one of the greatest explosions that ever occurred in the existence of man.
The explosion that took place about 74,000BP was classified at the highest degree of the volcanic explosivity index at VEI 8. The explosion ejected 2,800 cubic kilometres of matter into the sky, including sulphur that was transformed in sulphuric acid and changed the climate of the planet. The consequence was a catastrophic fall in the world’s atmospheric temperature, an average of 5°C. In Europe the summer temperature fell by 15°C and the climate of the northern regions of the world did not return to normal for years.
The extent of the explosion can be calculated by comparing it to the eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington State on the West Coast of the USA in 1980, which ejected one cubic kilometre of matter into the atmosphere. Whilst the explosion of Santorin, in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the fifteenth century BC, wiped-out the brilliant Minoan civilisation on the Island of Crete, ejected 60 cubic kilometres of matter.
The Toba volcano destroyed or severely affected much of insular and large parts of continental Asia, spreading a thick cover of ash, polluting the surface of the Indian and Pacific oceans with floating pumice.
The eruption was a catastrophic event for all life including Homo erectus. Strangely anthropologists have given very little consideration to the effects of Toba on Homo sapiens and Homo erectus, though for volcanologists, the Toba eruption is one of the most remarkable eruptions in the existence of man.
What is remarkable is that in spite of this terrible eruption and the tsunami that followed, man continued to survive in Java as fossils prove at Ngandong and no doubt in the eastern parts of Borneo. It should be remembered that in those regions man lived by the sea shore and on river banks and very few would have survived the tsunami that radiated out from Sumatra.
Volcanologists estimated that the zone of the explosion could not be approach by any living creatures by less than one thousand kilometres. The explosion was of such a gigantic scale, millions of times that of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, it would have been heard in Borneo over one thousand kilometres to the east. The sky became black with dust that obscured the sun and fell, covering the canopy of the forest. It was an apocalyptic event with the coast dwellers of Borneo fleeing to seek refuge in the dense forest and the vast cave complexes of the island, the seasons were changed and the temperatures dropped, trees did not produce fruit, animals died and erectus was decimated by lack of food, those who survived emerged to repopulate the island as forest and cave dwellers.
Plate tectonics have played a key role in the geological history of Indonesia. Three plates meet, the Asian, Australian and Pacific plates, making the country one of the most active volcanic and earth quake zones in the world. There are one hundred and thirty active volcanoes of which seventy have erupted in historic times, including Krakatoa in the Sunda Straits between Java and Sumatra, in 1883 causing the death of 36,000 by the tsunami wave that was formed when the caldera collapsed.
Most of Borneo had a very low volcanic or earthquake activity and as a consequence was never subject to the catastrophic changes that occurred in the belt of fire that ran along the south of the Indonesian archipelago.
‘Your skull here is not erectus but rather a very evolved form of erectus, definitely not sapiens, which proves that other species of man existed and survived, overcoming all kinds of dangers and natural disasters over hundreds of thousands of years on Borneo until very recent times,’ Lundy explained.
‘He must have been an intelligent creature to have survived.’
‘John, one of my scientific colleagues once said, ‘we think we can think, we think we are intelligent’. It is difficult to imagine that those concepts are relative and nothing more!’
‘So tell me Professor what are you getting at?’
‘Well what I trying to say is that this shows that the multiregional theory of evolution is now a real possibility.’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to convince the scientific world of that and not me.’
‘It’s like in Chad where our friend Michel Brunet has made his discoveries of our ancestors of the Australopithecus type that existed before Lucy which is proof that that evolution was not limited to the rift valley as Coppens would like to show.’
‘People ask me “Why do we have so many fossil remains from Africa?”, the answer is easy, we have simply not looked everywhere. Borneo for example has been an empty land as far as modern human populations are concerned and we now know that man has lived there for thousands of years. There must be caves full of human fossils that have not been discovered.
‘What we have found, and for that matter just about any other human fossil that has been found, has been by pure luck!’
‘Sure, by some accident of topography where ancient strata have been exposed by geological shifts.’
‘People in general have difficulty in trying to imagine the world of the hunter gatherers before agriculture was invented. They observe the few remaining hunter gatherers of Africa and Australia simply as primitive peoples whilst the better informed see them as ancient tribal cultures.’
‘That seems to be fairly normal.’
‘It’s not so simple as that, what we don’t realise or cannot realise is that the totality of human life on the planet consisted of very small and very scattered family groups, whose only object in life was to find food not far from a source of drinking water.’
‘I suppose that’s all they used it for?’
‘The family group could never be further than walking distance from drinking water, and the men who hunted could never go beyond twenty or thirty kilometres from water.
‘Family groups were limited in size by the amount of food that their territory could supply them. From time to time when nature was kind and food plentiful, families groups met, but their capacity to hunt remained limited and other resources were scarce which meant that they were widely spread over distances that did not favour their meeting.
‘If you take the area of Paris inside its periferique, the circular road that runs around the City of Paris, its diameter is about ten kilometres, enclosing an area of seventy-five square kilometres, well that would have been exploited by perhaps two family groups, each of about thirty persons, one to the north of the river and another to the south. Today there are over two million people living within that same circle.’
‘So the population of the world stagnated for hundreds of thousands of years?’
‘Absolutely, our ancestors were like the animals that we see today, bears or wolves, animals that are fairly omnivorous and range over large territories.’
‘Or herbivores?’
‘No, herbivores, such as we see in Africa, have enormous food resources on the savannas and their populations can grow into huge numbers limited only by the availability of their food, grass! When there is no grass it goes without saying that herbivores cannot exist.
‘As our ancestors learnt to hunt, they had more time to think and to improve their tools or work the materials they found around them. The invention of fire enabled them to eat more of the animals they hunted, if an animal could be carried back to the camp and cooked almost everything could be eaten, since it was easier to chew and digest, providing them with an important source of rich food when their hunters were successful.’
‘Why did man invent agriculture then?’
‘Ah, that’s another story, but it can be summed up by the ready availability of edible grass seeds in quantities that could be easily gathered and then stored. This happened very, very recently in man’s history, in the Mid
dle East along the fertile crescent, from the Persian Gulf across to the Mediterranean and down into Israel. In this region the climate was more subject to greater seasonal change than in the savannah where edible plants could not be found in sufficient quantities but where edible grass seed existed in quantity and variety, and most important, man had acquired the means to transform it into edible food, with fire, boiling water and advanced stone implements.’
‘So coming back to our non-agricultural man,’ Lundy commenced launching into a long discussion on early hunter gatherers in Borneo.’
Hunter gatherers had no need for agriculture, the abundance of edible fruits and plants saw to that. They lived by river banks, by lakes or by the sea using the nearby forest as their larder, filled with fruit, plants, insects, bird’s eggs, honey and animals with fish and shellfish from the rivers and sea. The climate remained remarkably constant over the two million years of their presence in the region and life continued peacefully in their tropical home with very little change.
Homo erectus was well adapted to his environment the pressures were few compared with his fellow creatures in other regions where climatic conditions varied considerably with the coming and going of ice ages with long periods of floods and droughts.
Evolutionary pressure was low and competition almost non-existent when the island was cut off from the Asian mainland, when the ice melted in the artic regions and the seas rose.
When the land bridge formed again innovations in tool making technology slowly filtered in over hundreds of thousands of years as exchanges were introduced by men who migrated little by little along the coast and up the rivers.
Nevertheless, Homo erectus evolved into a more gracile form, converging with the changes that were also occurring in hominids in other inhabited regions such as China, India, the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
After the cataclysm of Toba around 74,000 BP, when the climate had returned to its previous conditions Borneo man once again spread out into the nearby regions and continued his life as before.
The arrival of the first members of sapiens in about 40,000 BP changed little for Homo erectus, they were just as furtive, slowly colonising their new home. They did not arrive in huge sailing vessels with superior weapons; rather they encroached over thousands of years one or two kilometres with each generation.
They certainly co-habited at a respectful distance from each other over long generations. Their differences were comparable to the colonisation in modern times of New Guinea with the movement of ethnic Indonesian to its western shores. The confrontation was between two populations of modern man, having vastly different cultures and at the same time physically different. The Indonesians were of slight build, lighter skinned and straight haired, whilst the local Papuans were more robust, dark skinned, wiry haired. The Indonesians colonised the shore line whilst the Papuans retreated into the interior without any significant confrontation, that is until recent times and the political awakening of the both populations.
In Borneo, the real changes came with the invention of rafts and boats, more technically advanced peoples arrived by sea bringing with them agriculture and new tools around 7,000 BP.
In a small isolated community there is interbreeding and mutations occur. Weak mutations disappear rapidly in the first generation. The surviving gene pool is healthy, containing favourable mutations. Over many generations the members of isolated communities are often the offspring of one or two couples.
Some think that ancient populations followed evolutionary rhythms at constant rates and at the same time in all populations.
‘So according to the latest analysis of the mitochondrial genome by a Swedish gentleman at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, whose name I can’t remember off hand, we all have the same common origin, that dates back to some fifty thousand years ago in Africa, which I personally find hard to accept.
‘If we look at the present day populations of the planet there are wide variations, these differences are relatively superficial but are clearly visible, unless you’re as blind as some of our politically correct friends, just look at our Indonesians and Papuans. There are of course other differences, less visible to the eye, like immunity to certain diseases, intestinal flora and so on.’
‘So over a much longer period of time than fifty thousand years there are greater changes?’
‘Naturally, if we multiply these fifty thousand years by twenty, that is a period of one million years, then these superficial differences are considerably multiplied by other mutations as populations adapted to their local environments.’
‘Does retro-evolution exist?’
‘Well, manlike creatures have been around for six million years and have been transformed into modern man by a great number of random mutations that have been adopted in response to the environment.
‘The orang-utan here in Borneo is a perfect example of a retrograde mutation, in this case the mutations readapted it orang-utan for an arboreal life. The same thing could have happened for erectus in South East Asia, going back to the trees, since he lived in dense tropical forests. That didn’t happen he became gracile adapting to a life on the edge of rivers lakes and the sea, using the forest as a larder but not as tree home. He was equipped with tools and fire and a basic language, there was no turning back, he lived in equilibrium with his environment and the pressures were too weak to bring about any significant evolution, the advantages of being a hunter gatherer were greater, he could defend himself rather climbing up the nearest tree.’
They both laughed.
‘Never forget that we and the animals on this planet were not created in a final immutable form, maybe that’s going against religion and certainly against the creationists.’
‘For myself I’m a non-believer, life is part of the universe.’
‘Yes it is this chemistry that constantly recreates life via the genetic code producing continual mutations, some of which are retained giving the owners of those genes a greater survival potential in a changing environment.’
‘It’s amusing when the media and ecologists talk of the environment.’
‘Yes these changes in our planet’s environment have succeeded each other since the dawn of time, to a more or less catastrophic degree, the slow force of tectonic change or rapid climatic changes due to volcanic or stellar events. Whatever the cause, the change effects all plants and creatures and their food chain. All man can do is add his tiny grain of salt, in the overall plan man will change nothing, we are just a brief passing moment in our planet’s history.’
Jean Barthomeuf had taken small samples from the bone of borneensis for analysis to his Paris laboratory. The tests were carried out in the greatest secrecy since the results would be of enormous scientific value, unveiling for the first time the link between one of man’s ancestors, who had been declared extinct for at least thirty thousand years and had now made a sudden and dramatic reappearance.
The results would make cause an earthquake not only in the world’s scientific circles and their dry arcane journals but in the popular daily press and television, in every far corner of the planet.
The DNA was of good quality leaving the door open to the possibility of future cloning, but what was more surprising was that the DNA of the fossil was little different to that of modern humans and closer in its details to that of present day Asians.
In, other words borneensis showed a direct link between erectus and the present population of the world, which turned the Out of Africa theory on its head.
Erectus had transformed slowly into an evolved form which was no more than an archaic sapiens, absorbing and mixing with other populations arriving in his territory. None of the early populations of man were truly isolated, perhaps for a few thousand years. But that did not prevent them from mixing, as did Europeans with local populations when they arrived in the Americas or in Australia.
The oldest evidence of man in South America dated back to 22,000 years, since that time successive waves
of immigrants entered the continent from north-west Asia, and the north-east from Europe along the edge of the icecaps. The last wave introduced agriculture in the Andes around 8,000 BP. The separation in time between the populations of Spain and Portugal and those of the Incas was therefore around 7,000 years, who were in fact genetic brothers.
The fossils of Australia and Indonesia are separated by a much greater period of time, tens of thousands of years, sufficient time for evolutionary differences to have developed, differences that would have nevertheless been suppressed by mixing of those populations. It was therefore possible that there were different streams of populations converging to give birth to modern Homo sapiens. However, surviving pockets of ancient populations would have no doubt occurred in remote regions, such as Borneo. Those populations were slowly absorbed into the mainstream or simply disappeared, weakened by disease and climatic change or geological upheaval and catastrophic events such as the explosion of Mount Toba.
The Indonesian Government has had, unfortunately, little interest in anthropology and the sites which have been discovered in their country. Tegu Murtopo had a very small budget and doid not possess the scientific means to carry out the necessary work for dating and other research. But rather than let others do it for them, they prefer to block research, however, Aris with his Indonesian finesse made sure Murtopo was involved to avoid any future conflict or jealousy.
The Lost Forest Page 55