Chapter 63
AN EXPECTED GUEST
Aris was wearing a grin, the kind of silly grin he wore when he was embarrassed or surprised by something. He blinked and pushed his glasses up his nose.
‘Look, the Australians have found a new species of man!’
Ennis and Pierre Ros looked up suspiciously from their discussion on a planned trip to Beijing.
‘Where?’ said Pierre the first to find words.
‘Here!’
‘Here! You mean in Kalimantan?’
‘No, in Flores.’
Aris waved a print-out from his PC.
‘It’s in today’s Jakarta Post, an article in Nature,’ he handed it to Ennis.
The print-out was a report on an article in the scientific revue Nature announcing that a team of archaeologists had found a new species of tiny humans in the Liang Bua limestone cave on the Island of Flores to the east of Java and Bali. The paper had baptised them ‘Hobbits’ as they were no taller than one metre. The report said that they had lived about 18,000 years ago and may have survived until just 500 years ago in a on the east Indonesian island of Flores. The new species had been given the scientific name of Homo floresiensis.
Ennis looked up at Aris and handed the paper to Pierre Ros.
‘It’s a joke?’ asked Aris.
‘No idea,’ said Ennis with a worried look on his face.
‘Call Teuku Murtopo,’ said Pierre.
Aris looked at his watch then turned to his satellite phone and put in a call to Murtopo’s office at Gadjah Mada University. After a few moments he started speaking in Indonesian. The conversation lasted almost ten minutes before he clicked off.
‘Murtopo says that the specimen has now moved to his own lab from the Centre for Archaeology.’
‘What else did he say?’ asked Ennis impatiently.
‘Bak Tegu said it’s an ordinary human being, just like us. It’s not a new species.’
‘What is it then?’
‘He said it’s a sub-species of Homo sapiens classified under the Austrolo…something group, in other words just a fossil of a modern human that’s undergone pygmization. The Australian claim that the skeleton was the ancestor of the Indonesian people is pure nonsense.’
They all laughed, it had been a close shave, the last thing they wanted was to be beaten at the post by a new competing discovery.
A few days later they watched Murtopo in a TV interview stating that the Flores discovery was nothing more than microscephalic members of the modern human species. Then news came from the Australian leader of the team that discovered the skeleton, who announced that the skeleton was not a pathological case and the proof was they had uncovered the remains of at least seven individuals, all of them tiny, and belonging to the species Homo floresiensis.
To the dismay of the Kalimantan expedition all the beginnings of a full scale academic row were on the horizon which could only overshadow and discredit their own work. Pierre Ros pointed out that the chances against of finding an adult microcephalic prehistoric individual were extremely low and finding seven others who all shared the same features was astronomic.
The creature had a brain size of only 380 cubic centimetres, one-third less than the average brain size for a modern human and much smaller even than those of the habilis type skulls found in Dmanisi.
The skeletons were buried under a six meter thick layer of volcanic ash about 12,000-year-old in the Liang Bua cave with dates ranging from 95,000 to 13,000 years ago.
‘We have to reconcile ourselves to the idea that we have possible been upstaged. On the other hand it unequivocally supports our hypothesis. The question is should we go to press?’
‘What do you think John?’ asked Lundy.
‘I don’t know Professor, you’re the scientist, you know the ropes better then I do.’
‘I think it’s time, do you agree Pierre?’
‘Yes, in Beijing, at the conference, before the papers on the Flores discovery are discussed.’
‘What about Murtopo?’
‘I’m sorry to say he’s getting on in years and of course there’s probably quite a bit of professional jealousy involved. It would have been better if the Australians had worked more closely with Murtopo to make a joint announcement. It’s not the first time that Murtopo has agreed with foreign scientists, there was already a disagreement on dating the Solo skulls.’
‘Yes,’ said Aris, ‘it was exactly what we wanted to avoid here. The risk now is that Murtopo will go ahead with an announcement about our work here to get back his lost face. Murtopo criticized the announcement of the discovery without the consent of the Indonesian archaeologists, notably R. P. Soejono of the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta, who participated in the work, and said it was unethical.’
‘Murtopo was probably unhappy about the fact that the Australians scientists were there before him, publishing their discovery in Nature without consulting him.’
‘Quite right, they’ve worked for years and years on several sites in the Soa Basin of central Flores that have shown hominids were on the island by 840,000 years ago.’
‘It’s not in our interest to upset Murtopo. So, no remarks to the press about floresiensis!’
‘Borneensis will end up in cabinet in Murtopo’s office in Jakarta at the National Centre for Archaeology.’
‘Whatever happens now our discovery and the Flores discovery are going to put the Out-of-Africa and Multiregional theories out into the open. A lot of smug people are going to have to revise their ideas, people such as our friend Etxeberri.’
They all laughed at the thought of Etxeberri and one or two other prima donnas having to back pedal and revise their theories.
Until the discovery in Kalimantan and Flores the broad pattern of human palaeontology had been focused on Africa and to a much lesser extent Asia. The new discoveries would attract very much increased attention on the islands of Southeast Asia and cave deposits on the Asian mainland. The distribution of the human species was much more complex than had been previously thought by science and as a consequence Asia could play a much more significant role than that imagined by the adherents of the Out of Africa hypothesis with evidence of early modern humans in Asia as early as any of the African evidence.
The ancestors of floresiensis, probably a form of Homo erectus, could have reached Flores eight hundred thousand years ago as stone tools on the island suggest probably by some kind of boat or raft.
The problem about palaeoanthropology was that its theories were only as good as the latest discovery and since more and more fossils pointing to contradictory evidence turn up the family tree becomes more and more difficult to interpret. The discoveries in Asia from Dmanisi serve to put African fossils into better focus.
In the case of borneensis and floresiensis the family tree simply adds more branches with a greater variety of the erectus family with broader skills than previously suspected. The tools found were made by borneensis or borneensis learned to make the stone tools from Homo sapiens. Personally I think borneensis was making stone tools. We have found the same tools from 40,000 years ago until 3000 years ago with no evident change in technology or materials.
There’s little in common with the stone tools we have found in Kalimantan and those found in other erectus sites in Asia. However, the link between the tools and the skeletal remains we have found is quite clear. Homo borneensis was a toolmaker and used fire, did he learn this from his Homo sapien neighbours? I think he did, I think the cross flow of knowledge and genes was probably greater than has been imagined up to this point.
‘So let me explain it this way,’ said Pierre. ‘Hominoidea is the superfamily of primates that includes all the apes, including humans. Now there are two families of hominoids, first the gibbons, or lesser apes, in the family Hylobatidae, and then the greater apes and hominids in the family Hominidae.’
‘So we are Hominidae?’
‘Yes, Homininae is a subfamily of Hominidae, th
at includes Homo sapiens, some extinct relatives, and the gorillas and the chimpanzees. It comprises all those hominids, such as Australopithecus, that arose after the split from the other great apes.’
‘Confusing.’
‘You’ll get the hang of it,’ he said laughing.
Ennis opened the safe that was hidden from view by a sliding panel in the Empire style bookcase behind his desk. He inserted the key one by one into each of the locks and turning it to the code then pulled the heavy door open. He placed the skull inside and relocked the safe.
He then took the Metro to the Grande Biblioteque on the recently built Line 14. He had fixed a meeting in a non-descript Irish pub nearby with Pierre Ros. It was not far from the Metro station on the wrong side of the railway tracks that led to Gare d’Austerlitz, why Pierre had chosen that spot was a mystery. He walked slowly along the rundown shops and garages that lined rue Chevaleret opposite on the other side was the Grande Biblioteque François Mitterrand, an ugly monument to his fourteen years of socialism. The sky was exceptionally blue for late October and it was not at all cold.
‘Voila!’ said Ennis placing a solid looking plywood box, about the size of a hatbox, on the table.
Pierre raised his eyebrows and reclined slightly.
‘Not from the IRA I hope?’
‘No, on the contrary something much more interesting, something that will help us defuse a problem,’ Ennis said slowly removing the cover.
Pierre raised himself and peeked into the box. He whistled softly.
‘Where did you get it?’
‘Delivered from London yesterday morning, by hand no less, personally by my good friend Jimmy Fogg.’
‘The missing skull!’
‘Yes it will put Murtopo firmly on our side.’
After examining the photos Professor Murtopo had no doubt that it was the same cranium that had been found in a sand bank on Solo River in the Sambungmachan District of East Java. It had been bought from a workman for a few dollars by a local small time fossil dealer who had then sold it to the American businessman in the antique market in Jakarta. It has then been illegally brought out of the country. The skull was one of three fossils found at the site and had disappeared before the University could intervene.
The cranium had resemblances to those of the Ngandong skulls, and at the same time different. It had certain Homo erectus characteristics with a thick cranial bone and a pronounced browridge but a high forehead and rounded braincase that were more common with archaic Homo sapiens.
However, the cranial capacity was low, around 1,000cc compared to with 1,200cc in archaic Homo sapiens but what was interesting was the brain imprint showed evidence of Broca’s Cap, a sign that indicated the possibility of speech. From the little evidence available Murtopo had, he estimated it to be around 40 or 50,000 years old.
‘My dear Mister Ennis, what an extraordinary surprise, what a gift!’
‘Yes Professor.’
‘How can I thank you?’
‘Just add your name to our article to be published in Nature.’
‘I would be delighted to.”
EPILOGUE
New species? The following is a report from Stuart Wavell on unknown animals recently found in New Guinea. It appeared on the Internet site of Timesonline, the 12 February 2006. The description is in the best traditions of jungle exploration:
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‘As the little band of explorers approached a distant reddish plateau that loomed above the South American jungle, they saw a huge grey bird flap slowly up from the ground and glide away. “To the best of my belief, a pterodactyl,” Professor Challenger pronounced.
This first portent of The Lost World, Conan Doyle’s fictional story of 1912, has a curious parallel with the moment when Kris Helgen, an American mammalogist, stepped out of a helicopter in New Guinea last December and noticed a brightly coloured bird flitting among the trees. It stopped him in his tracks.
To Helgen’s expert eye, the creature seemed as incredible as a pterodactyl. Decorated with a bright orange face-patch and a pendant wattle under each eye, it was an unknown species of honeyeater, and the first new bird to be discovered on the Pacific island since the Second World War. “It was an amazing clue that we were on to something big,” Helgen says.
Over the next 15 days, the 20-strong expedition from Conservation International rubbed their eyes in disbelief as dozens of new species came to light in the Foja forest. Fearlessly, normally shy forest wallabies hopped around the jungle camp. Above, a bird of paradise of almost mythological rarity performed a mating dance, while a golden-fronted bowerbird displayed on its sculpture of twigs.
The exciting possibility was that because of the area’s isolation in the Indonesian half of New Guinea, some distinct species had evolved separately, like Charles Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands. “Lots of the plants and animals we found seemed to be unique to the area,” Helgen says.
Others were relicts of a lost Eden. “It showed a glimpse of what much of the world would have looked like before human influence spread,” Helgen judges.
Last week the expedition’s tally of finds — 40 new species of mammal, four new species of butterfly and innumerable insects — captivated the world. But to Shane Winser, who has advised explorers for the past 30 years at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), the hoard was not so very remarkable.
“It’s really not that difficult to discover a new species, because the biodiversity of the world is so huge that comparatively few plants and animals have been named,” she says. She has no wish to play down the achievements of the American-Australian-Indonesian expedition: her point is that this cornucopia gives the lie to assumptions that the world is so thoroughly mapped and surveilled by satellites that there are no mysteries left to discover.
In the proud tradition of Sir Richard Burton and John Speke, who competed to discover the source of the Nile, Britain remains in the forefront of exploration. The RGS alone sponsors up to 50 expeditions a year on quests as diverse as tracking the last Simien wolves in Ethiopia and studying woolly monkeys in Colombia.
The most promising target areas for new discoveries are in the three great blocks of surviving tropical forest in South America, central and west Africa, and southeast Asia. The inaccessible and inhospitable rivulets of the Amazon conceal myriad undiscovered species, not to mention uncontacted tribes whom everyone supposed would be extinct by the 21st century.
New varieties of large primates are believed to lurk in the Congo basin, where exploration is confounded by human conflicts. Last year a puzzling new species of mammal — a carnivore about the size of a fox — was photographed in the jungles of Borneo, which are thought to contain the orang pendek, a manlike ape.
Even peninsular Malaysia is yielding up surprises. Little remains of the pristine forest of which Sir George Maxwell wrote in 1907: “Virgin in the days of which we cannot guess the morn, virgin it will remain in the days of generations yet unborn.” But in the past few months there have been reports of hairy “apemen” in the jungles of Johor, last seen in the 1950s.
Or take the island of Madagascar, separated from the African mainland 160m years ago. A new study identifies 10 new species of lemur and classifies nine others as separate species.
But for the “wow” factor, a treasure trove awaits beneath the sea. Winser, who has been on 10 expeditions, says: “If I was setting out as an explorer today, it would be the deep oceans I would want to work in. I never thought in my lifetime we would discover an entirely different lifeform. David Attenborough’s programme The Blue Planet showed worm-like creatures living off hydrothermal vents in the mid-Atlantic ridge. It shows you don’t have to go to the moon or into space to find something new.”
Yet to Helgen, arriving in New Guinea’s Foja mountain forest was akin to landing on another planet. Rearing up from the lowland jungle to a height of 7,000ft, it was so thickly swathed in vegetation that the expedition helicopter could find nowhere to put down.
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“It was unbroken, old-growth forest,” he relates. “The only breaks in the cover were landslides on hillsides. Finally at about 5,000ft we found a bog where we could land. We got in and out at the right moment, because it flooded and became a lake twice in the period we were there.”
The jungle rose precipitously around them. “The ground and trees were covered in moss, like a big carpet over everything. We made a camp, about 150ft above the level of the bog, which was often misted in. It was raining much of the time and we were constantly wet.
“We had to trample down our own tracks, marking them with tape so no one got lost. That could have been devastating, as there was not much hope of getting helicopter assistance.”
They laid about two miles of trails through the forest, a tiny sample area in a tract of 2.4m acres comprising the largest pristine forest in Asia. It was on one such path that Helgen experienced his second Professor Challenger moment.
Helgen found the next best thing to a dinosaur — the world’s largest egg-laying mammal, called a long-beaked echidna, New Guinea’s most mysterious animal. Weighing around 20lb, jet black with ivory white spines poking through its fur like a porcupine, it spears earthworms with its barbed tongue and sucks them up through its straw-like snout.
“It’s an animal like nothing else,” he marvels. “They were once widespread in New Guinea but are now such a rarity because they were a favourite food item.”
To his astonishment, he and colleagues found a colony of echidnas. “We found three on three consecutive nights by walking along the path and just picking them up.”
The reason for this abundance was the total absence of humans, but the story of the expedition could have ended quite differently had hostile groups of tribesmen inhabited the range. The explorers and film makers Mark Anstice and Bruce Parry had such an encounter six years ago when setting out to climb a little-known mountain in West Papua.
“We went into an area where we were told we would be eaten,” Anstice recalls. “Our porters had baled out two weeks previously for the same reason. In the swamps, we came across this small clan group of Korowai, the last hunter-gatherers in New Guinea. They had a bit of leaf wrapped around the end of their foreskins and things through their noses, with decorative scarring on their bodies.
“They were absolutely terrified of us, but then they got their bows out and aimed their arrows at us. We were forced to leg it.”
Anstice was electrified. “I was blown away. I just believed, like most other people, that the area had been flown over extensively and there was nothing left to find. That expedition changed the planet for me. It showed there was a lot left to find.”
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The Lost Forest Page 64