Zone of the Marvellous

by Martin Edmond

  Then there is the vexed question of South America from which, without doubt, the Polynesian staple root crop, the sweet potato known as the kūmara, came – how, no one knows. It may have floated and hence have been naturally introduced. Or someone might have brought or fetched it. Recently published genetic evidence shows that the Polynesian chook, universally called moa, lived in Chile in prehistoric times, additional confirmation of early voyages across the eastern Pacific. From the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati) comes an account collected by Arthur Grimble in the 1920s of what may have been such a voyage. A sailing chief by the name of Te Raaka is alleged to have seen a wall of high snow-capped mountains; but as the land was desert and would grow nothing, he returned home. Other fragmentary Polynesian traditions suggest visits to Antarctica and to the Galápagos. Thor Heyerdahl, who spent a year in the late 1930s living on Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas, heard there an oral tradition that convinced him of cultural contacts between Polynesia and South America and spent half a lifetime trying to prove it. He also believed people from America’s northwest coast travelled into the Pacific and founded colonies there; and there are theories too that the Polynesians were whale-hunters who came into the ocean from the north.

  Australia is much closer to New Zealand than Fiji is to Tahiti; and even closer to Norfolk Island. It seems probable, indeed likely, that Polynesians sailed to mainland Australia – but there is no evidence to say that they did. A return voyage, bringing with it a name, is also possible but, apart from the fugitive mentions recorded on Cook’s first voyage, there’s no evidence of that either. Still it is worth looking a little closer at the name. There is no ‘l’ in Māori as it is now written but in early orthographies ‘l’ was often used for the ‘r’ that is frequently rolled or otherwise accentuated. Perhaps Ulimaroa, in modern spelling, might look something like this: Uri-ma-roa. Roa is long, as in Ao-tea-roa; māroha means spread out or extended, which would fit Australia. As for uri – this can mean dark, particularly with reference to the colour of a stone; it can also mean offspring, descendant or relative; but if ure was meant, it signifies penis and, by extension, man. Uru, another possibility, means head or chief or top. The land of the long dark rock is a credible translation.

  Ulimaroa persists in Australia. A heritage-protected mansion in St Kilda Road, Melbourne, bears that name; it is now the home of the Royal College of Anaesthetists of Australia and New Zealand. The house, designed by German architect John Koch, was built in 1889 for Wesleyan minister Dr I. E. Watkin whose father had been a missionary in Tonga and the South Island of New Zealand. Dr Watkin was educated at Wesley College in Auckland and is no doubt the source of the name. The house was sold in 1899 to a ship-owner, John Traill, who called one of his Huddart Parker ships SS Ulimaroa. The name was also given to a rail-stop town in central Queensland but how or why is unclear. It remains a glorious might-have-been, a Great South Land with a Polynesian not a European name.

  IN AUSTRALIA IT HAS taken a very long time for the extent and character of the previous society, or societies, to be understood. The vast continent was comprehensively and anciently inhabited in all its niches. Opinions on the subject differ but before 1788 there may have been as many as 750 distinct languages spoken by a similar number of social groups; now fewer than 200 languages remain alive and most of these are endangered. As few as twenty, all in remote areas, are still being learned by children. The most widely spoken Aboriginal languages, Warlpiri in the central desert and Tiwi on Bathurst and Melville Islands, north of Darwin, have around 3000 speakers each. Very little is known about Tasmanian languages, which became extinct before much was recorded; 10,000 years of separation from the mainland must have resulted in some unique variations.

  This huge diversity, which is at its greatest in the north and northwest, should not be seen as a cacophony of mutually unintelligible tongues: most distinct languages were comprehensible (on all sides) to a language group’s neighbours, whose dialect would be understood in turn by its neighbours; and so on across the continent. Trading routes existed that spanned the entire land, bringing for instance pearl shell from the northwest coast down as far as the south and the southeast, where there were sedentary populations along the great rivers, farming eels and cultivating the land with their fire sticks. Cook’s insight that these were a people whose culture was not expressed primarily via technological achievements was accurate: the forms of non-material expression have largely eluded Western comprehension and, despite romantic attempts at identification, continue to do so.

  From the earliest days of inland exploration Europeans in Australia were obsessed by the idea that there might, or should be, an inland sea. Or perhaps, a recent opinion has it, they were really looking for great rivers. There was a sea – its vast extent stretched at times from the Great Dividing Range in the east to the bastions of ancient rocks in the far west of the continent. In the middle Jurassic, 150 million years ago, freshwater Lake Walloon occupied the central-eastern part of the continent; by the late Cretaceous it had shrunk to form the smaller Lake Winton which, 21 million years ago in the early Miocene, lay approximately where Lake Eyre now is. In the Miocene it was open, though not at the same time, to the sea in both the north and the south – the bones of dolphins have been found. Its successor, Lake Dieri, a Pleistocene greater Lake Eyre, was subject to large-scale climatic variations; today it is an occasionally flooded dry salt pan.

  Lake Eyre, the largest ephemeral lake in the world, was thought at first to be only a salt pan; it was dry from its European discovery in 1840 until the miraculous first recorded filling in 1949. Even so, this and later floods were thought to be isolated events. Now they are understood in relation to the El Niño/La Niña or Southern Oscillation. Lake Eyre is inclined to flood during La Niña events, when the central and eastern Pacific Ocean cools; and is usually out of phase with El Niño events, when the same oceanic waters warm. Most floods come from the east but when it rains heavily the lake can fill from either direction. Flows can be exceptionally heavy: in 1984, and again in 1989, in just three days western flows equivalent to a sixth of the discharge of the Amazon over the same period reached Lake Eyre. The waters of the 2009 filling came from the east but the flows were by these standards moderate.

  The past 100,000 years, also the time of human occupation of Australia, has been a period of drying out of the inland lakes including, but not confined to, Lake Eyre – there were many other lakes in Central Australia, especially in the east, and they can be understood as remnants of the greater lakes that preceded them. With the drying of the lakes and the arrival of humans, the megafauna of ancient Australia began to die out. Flamingos once flourished at Lake Eyre and giant flightless, perhaps carnivorous birds, bigger than moa. Diprotodon was a marsupial herbivore the size and general shape of a rhinoceros. There were giant kangaroo, wombat and koala, and marsupial predators such as the thylacoleo, as big as a leopard, and a kind of goanna 6 metres in length. The crocodiles were even larger.

  The land to which the first humans came was thus not as it is now. The mostly sunken continent of Zealandia has its Australian equivalent in Sahul, a Pleistocene land mass that included both New Guinea and Tasmania. Sahull or Sahoel was the name on seventeenth-century Dutch maps for a perhaps delusive sandbank between Australia and Timor; its origin is obscure although the word does appear as a proper name in Islam, where it means king of kings. Now it is used to distinguish greater Australia from the equivalent, and also mostly submerged, continent to the west called Sunda. In between is a biogeographic zone known as Wallacea, consisting of the islands east of the Wallace Line but west of New Guinea: the Malukus and the Indonesian islands of Sulawesi, Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores, Sumba and Timor. Authorities differ over where to place the Philippines.

  These three lost lands – Sunda, Wallacea, Sahul – sound fanciful and remote but in fact existed as recently as the last Glacial Maximum about 18,000 years ago, when sea levels were 100 or more metres below where they are now. Sunda was essentially a penins
ula of the Asian continent: Java, Borneo and Sumatra were connected by land to the present-day Malay Peninsula; both Hainan and Taiwan were part of the Chinese mainland; most of what is now the South China Sea was above the water. You could walk from the Irrawaddy Delta in Burma to the coast of Kalimantan and then out on to what is now the long thin island of Palawan to look across the waters to the Philippines.

  This part of the world has been occupied by humans of one sort or another for a very long time. Fossil hominin remains from Java are thought to be at least 800,000 years old and possibly twice that. Similar finds from near Beijing may be as ancient. The recent discovery of the remains of diminutive fossil humans on the island of Flores has caused massive controversy. It is at least possible, if not likely, that a species of ancient people resembling australopithecines, different from but related to us, persisted there until about the time of the Last Glacial Maximum. Homo sapiens, our species, might have been in Sunda as early as 75,000 years ago. A massive explosion at Lake Toba in Sumatra is thought to have precipitated a volcanic winter lasting years; some say the event was so catastrophic that the global population of Homo sapiens was reduced to about 15,000 individuals and maybe to as few as 1000 breeding pairs.

  There was a considerable number of humans living in Sunda past the time of the Last Glacial Maximum. And in Sahul too. Given that we are a water-loving species and that our settlements are often at river mouths or otherwise coastal, it seems likely that the low-lying portions of both Sahul and Sunda were heavily populated. A great river system probably drained the plains that lay north of Sumatra and west of Borneo, flowing into the sea just south of the Spratly Islands. Another flowed east past Java and debouched north of Bali. Both river valleys must have thronged with people; who they were we can only imagine. Equally, the diversity of languages in northern Australia and in New Guinea probably derives from thriving cultures living on the land bridge between the two big islands. There may have been another complex of cultures extant on the planar extensions of the eastern coast – that is, where the Tasman Sea now is – and some scholars have speculated upon the possibility that these two major groupings flourished independently of each other for some time before meeting in east central Australia as the climate changed, sea waters rose and the inland began to dry.

  How quickly climate change proceeded at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum is still a matter of dispute. Some see it as a gradual inundation that took perhaps as long as 15,000 years to reach present-day sea levels less than 8000 years ago; others surmise a series of three shocks, each larger than the last, culminating in a major flood that saw the oceans quite suddenly reach today’s levels. In this scenario each of the three floods was preceded by a cold snap between 400 and 1200 years long, followed by sudden ice melts that released enormous amounts of fresh water into the oceans. The first, about 14,000 years ago, may have raised the seas 13.5 metres in about 300 years. At the peak of this event the waters could have been rising 7 centimetres a year. The second event took place about 11,500 years ago with a rise of 7.5 metres in about 160 years. The third, and most extreme, took place when the Laurentide ice sheet over northeast Canada collapsed 8000 years ago.

  It is this third flood that may have left traces in human memory. Some estimates suggest that sea levels might have increased by as much as 25 metres at a rate of between 8 and 15 centimetres per year, followed by a rapid, though temporary, recession of the waters. Globally the effects would have varied from place to place but would have been major everywhere. It needs to be emphasised that these shocks were on top of rising sea levels that proceeded, at a slower rate, throughout the period; and that the cold snaps saw sea levels fall before they began to rise again. The catastrophic flood events would also have been associated with tsunami and with increased volcanism. The melting of an ice sheet as massive as the Laurentide would have meant a springing back of the land as the weight on top of it was released and compensatory world-wide adjustments to the earth’s crust.

  THIS BRIEF, NOT uncontroversial, account of rising sea levels in the last 15,000 years is taken from Stephen Oppenheimer’s 1998 book Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia. One of Oppenheimer’s suggestions is that our understanding of the archaeology of the period is fatally flawed by what he calls false horizons. At its simplest, these false horizons are the result of our inability to examine archaeological remains that now lie beneath the sea. The Arabian Gulf, for instance, was probably predominantly land until the most recent inundation. The Sumerian civilisation, conventionally considered the first city-based culture on earth, may have originated to the east of present-day Mesopotamia. Flood stories like that contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh might be accounts of real events and not, as we like to say, myths, those diseases of language. The biblical Flood may be a memory of the same event: not the result of forty days and nights of rain but a transgression of the sea up on to the land.

  Oppenheimer goes further than this. He advances the hypothesis that there may already have been a city-based civilisation in South East Asia on land that was lost when the ocean flooded in to form the shallow seas north of Java and west of Borneo. This supposition can be extended to the lands that once existed to the west and south of India and also to those that lay east of what is now the Chinese mainland. The enigmatic Bradshaw figures of the Kimberley, showing elaborately coiffed and costumed human and supernatural dancers, non-Australian animals like deer, and people in boats, might have their origin in a civilisation to the west of Sahul – perhaps as far west as Sunda. In Oppenheimer’s view the dispersal of Austronesian-speaking peoples was also a consequence of the Flood. People in the old heartland of what is now island South East Asia had only two choices – to head for the hills or take to their boats. The Orang Laut, the Bajau, the Moken and the Urak Lawoi, sometimes referred to collectively as the Sea Peoples or Sea Gypsies, some of whom still live on their boats in amongst the great archipelagoes of the region, could be a remnant of this forced dispersal.

  Oppenheimer is not alone in his belief that the Polynesian homeland, the first Hawaiki, is to be found, not in Taiwan or mainland China but somewhere in the region of the drowned continent – perhaps in the Sulu Sea north of Borneo or in the Celebes Sea south of Mindanao. Recent genetic studies of the Polynesian rat suggest its ultimate origin is Halmahera, the K-shaped island in Maluku between Sulawesi and New Guinea. Austronesian speakers sailed as far east as Easter Island and perhaps to South America as well; in the west they reached Madagascar, although those voyages seem to have been made well into historic times. The alleged discovery in New Zealand of Polynesian rat remains over 2000 years old is another provocation to standard versions of Austronesian dispersal.

  Oppenheimer is a medical doctor who worked for many years in tropical pediatrics. He has done major research into malaria and particularly into the genetic mutations humans have developed that protect against it. Subsequent books and studies of his have concentrated on the genetics of human dispersal and migration and what it can tell us of our near and distant past. He is not, on the face of it, a crank or a charlatan; yet many people remain skeptical of his most extravagant claim: that the civilisation alleged to have existed in Sunda might have been the source of one of our most enduring myths, that of the Garden of Eden. In his view it is possible that refugees from the catastrophe might have fled as far as the shores of the Indian Ocean and, perhaps via the civilisation that developed along the Indus Valley, directly influenced the Sumerian culture that lies at the base of those cultures from which the West derives its own.

  In this view the seven sages, the Abgallu (ab – water, gal – great, lu – man) who came from the sea to instruct early Sumer in the ways of wisdom are a metaphoric telling of this earliest dispersal of culture. The Abgallu were said to have existed before the Flood and were represented sometimes as winged and eagle-headed, at others with bodies of fish. Oannes, the best known of them, could take off his scaly coat to reveal a man’s figure beneath it. He lived under th
e ocean but came out of the water in the day-time to bring instruction in writing, the arts and science. As for Gilgamesh, his ancient quest for immortality took him as far as the shallow seas of island South East Asia where he met Utanapishti, the Faraway, the Noah figure who survived the Flood.

  MARINE ARCHAEOLOGY is a young discipline, only about fifty years old. It depends upon scuba diving, which is not a particularly consistent or reliable form of investigation of possible man-made underwater sites. Local factors such as turbulence, turbidity, tides and currents will always limit what can be seen and photographed; and excavation of any kind is rarely possible. Graham Hancock, a diver himself and an indefatigable populist of marine archaeology, quotes an estimate that in the last half century about 500 submerged sites containing the remains of man-made structures or of lithic artefacts have been found world-wide. Of these sites about a hundred are, or may be, more than 3000 years old. This is probably a rather small proportion of potential sites; most marine archaeology concentrates upon the discovery and excavation of shipwrecks. Hancock believes the discipline has not concerned itself enough with the possibility that the post-glacial floods might in some way be connected to the rise of civilisations. It is a lack he has tried consistently to redeem by his own efforts.

  Perhaps half a dozen known sites suggest the existence of cities now under water. In the Gulf of Cambay off northwest India divers seeking to monitor pollution levels found structures that appear to be congruent with, but older than, the cities of Harappa and Mohenjodaro along the Indus Valley. The roots of the Indus Valley civilisation, considered archaeologically, go back about 6000 years; the cities are younger than that, usually dated from about 5000 years BP. These people used writing but their script has yet to be deciphered. They also traded into Sumer and, as has been mentioned, some scholars believe the Abgallu represented the transmission of culture from ancient Sind into the fertile crescent. The apparent discovery of a precursor civilisation below the sea clearly represents an extension back in time of this mysterious culture.