by Tim Flannery
I was pondering on how these remains could have accumulated and become fossilised in this part of the cave when I saw a much larger bone lying in a fissure near the inner entrance. It looked like a human shoulder blade, and it was with very little enthusiasm that I reached down for it, dreading to find evidence that the cave had once been used as an ossuary. Apart from my personal aversion to working in such places, any investigation of a cave used for these purposes could lead to misunderstandings with the local people. After all, almost anyone would be sensitive about strangers poking around and taking bones from their ancestral cemetery.
But, as I picked up the bone, these dismal thoughts flew instantly from my mind. It was heavy and mineralised, different in shape from a human shoulder blade. It was, I realised, an ancient fossil which bore unmistakable signs that it had once belonged to a marsupial. My skin tingled with excitement.
In my hand lay the bone of a long-extinct, gigantic marsupial! Here was my ticket to New Guinea's ice age.
My elation was tempered by thoughts of negotiating the squeeze to enter the cave proper. Still, I seized the moment and started to force myself into the claustrophobic cleft. The squeeze was roughly Z-shaped in plan section; broadest on top, but narrowing alarmingly at the bottom. I went in head first, and had managed to contort my body into the obligatory Z-shape when I felt myself losing my grip on the walls and sliding down into the narrower part of the opening.
Suddenly, I was entirely trapped.
Gravity had wedged me into the crevasse—and my struggles were fixing me ever more tightly into it. My face was hard against a cold, wet, slimy rock-face, my head twisted at an awkward angle. Irregularities on the rock-face seemed to catch at my knees, ankles and back, while my left arm dangled helplessly free in the lowest part of the crack, which widened perversely to deny me a grip.
I was pinned halfway into a cave at 3,000 metres elevation in the mountains of Irian Jaya, half a day's walk from the nearest airstrip. Help, if it ever arrived, would be slow in coming. There would be little Geoff and Bren could do in this situation.
I fought off rising panic.
After several minutes I decided to try an experiment. I emptied my lungs as thoroughly as I could and, holding myself in place with my head and knees, tried to shift my body upward. I then expanded my lungs as far as possible, hoping to wedge myself in the higher position. After a few such efforts I had risen a few centimetres and freed my knees. Now I had some room to manoeuvre and continued to push upward and forward. Soon, my head emerged into a large chamber.
Into this I clambered with relief and wonderment.
The inner chamber of Kelangurr Cave is a beautiful place. Stalactites hang from the ceiling, while stalagmites, great fractured lumps of fallen stalactites and small rills of limestone cover the floor. Like a palaeontological Aladdin's cave, large bones lay everywhere between the glinting calcium. At my feet was a jaw, beyond that a skull, and over there, leg bones and ribs.
Elated again now, I realised that we had stumbled across a treasure trove of ancient remains.
As we went further into the cave, I was disappointed to discover that there were fewer bones. The main deposit, we surmised, must have lain outside the existing cave. A vast landslide would have carried away the main chamber in prehistoric times, leaving Kelangurr Cave behind as a mere remnant. This would explain its entrance being high in the cliff-face, as well as the predominance of bones near the mouth. The fallen and broken stalactites told another tale. Earthquakes had rocked through the chamber at least three times, sending spears of calcium raining towards the floor. Perhaps one of the quakes had been powerful enough to have carried away the main chamber.
Studying the bones some time later in the museum, I would discover that the larger ones belonged to two kinds of marsupials. The majority were from the creature whose shoulder bone I had first found. A distant relative of wombats and koalas, the extinct marsupial was about the size of a panda. It may also have looked rather similar to a panda, for it had a small pushed-in muzzle, forward-pointing eyes, a very short tail, and it inhabited high mountain forests, as do pandas today.
From its teeth it was plain that it was a plant-eater, and of a genus and species completely unknown to science. Here was an extraordinary discovery indeed. Perhaps the largest creature ever to have trudged the high mountain forests of New Guinea, its remains had, until that day, lain undisturbed and undiscovered in the cave for millennia. Several years later I had the pleasure of naming the new genus and species Maokopia ronaldi. The first part of the name recalls its habitat, the Maokop Range, as the Dani know Irian's mountains. The second part honours a friend and fellow scientist, Ronald Strahan.
The second large creature to leave its remains in the cave was an extinct kind of wallaby about the size of a grey kangaroo. It, too, belonged to an undescribed species, although its genus, Protemnodon, had been described more than 150 years earlier from remains found in Australia. I named the species Protemnodon hopei, after Geoff Hope, to whom I owe so much. Although its remains were less common than those of Maokopia, there were sufficient to determine that it too was a plant-eater, and that, unlike the living large Australian kangaroos, it could hop only slowly.
So occupied was I with these fossils that I almost failed to notice a neat nest made of freshly picked leaves pressed into the clay floor of the cave, just inside the entrance. From the warmth remaining in it, I concluded that whatever was using the nest must have only just vacated it. Searching the cracks and crevices for evidence of the occupant, I saw a large black blob perched on a distant ledge. From the tip of its nose to the end of its tail, the creature was the best part of a metre long. As the beam of the torch caught it, it let out a loud, dog-like snarl which reverberated round the cavern.
’Keneta,’ one of our Lani companions whispered in my ear.
The English name of the animal the Lani know as Keneta is the Black-tailed Giant-rat (Uromys anak). I had seen the species just once before. One day on the Sol River a Telefol hunter had come into camp, his hand tightly bandaged. He opened his bilum, and angrily threw down the body of an enormous black rat. Clearly, before examining the catch, I had to treat his wound. As I began to unwind the bandage, I realised that the inner layers were dripping with blood. Its source was a horrific injury to his right thumb. The last joint had been bitten right through, and the nail was shattered with punctures. So severe were these that the end of the thumb appeared to be pulp, which wobbled as I dropped antiseptic onto it.
’Quotal,’ he said, as he explained how he had been feeling in a tree-hollow for a possum. Instead he had come across Quotal, as Telefol know the species. The bite of no other animal is feared as much by them. Its incisors are razor sharp and up to two centimetres long. The terrible damage done by repeated bites to this hunter had been inflicted by an immature rat.
Now, despite its fearsome reputation, I wished to get a closer look at this remarkable animal in the cave. I asked my Lani companions to help me by blocking a possible escape route while I approached the beast to take some photographs. The Lani youths were, however, wavering in their resolve, and scampered quickly away when the rat moved leisurely towards them. They were nervous about being in the cave in any case, and seemed to be reluctant to tackle the rat. I tracked it to a new position, from where I could tell that it was an adult male. After taking my photos, I left the lads, whose resolve had stiffened, and went to explore the deeper recesses of the cave. I could see one Lani youth outlined in the spotlight of Bren's torch, wielding a detached stalactite at a dark object whose snarls shattered the quiet of the cave. It looked for all the world like a scene from the Stone Age as pictured in one of the How and Why books of my childhood.
The cave ended in a large chamber which, although impressively hung with stalactites, contained neither fossils nor fauna. Enchanted with its beauty, but disappointed with the results, I realised that the time had come to negotiate the squeeze yet again and return to our camp. This time things went mor
e smoothly, and I was soon in the outer air. A shaft of sunlight illuminated the bones in my hand, which had known nothing but darkness for at least 40,000 years.
Geoff, Bren and I spent a few more days in the area examining fossil-bearing deposits exposed in the banks of the West Baliem River. Unfortunately the river was high during our visit, and most of the deposits were under water. We did manage to retrieve a few bones, however, largely from pebble banks near the bridge.
I obtained bones in situ on only one occasion. A couple of youths showed me the place where they had found bones when the river was low. It was on a bend below a high, abrupt bank. I waded out into the river, which was murky, thigh-deep and freezing. I began to grope in the mud with my toes for anything which felt like a bone. If I encountered a shape which felt interesting, I would try to reach it with my hands. After about fifteen minutes, getting close to my limit for exposure to near-freezing water, I felt a long, thin object between my toes. I reached for it, and came up with the lower leg bone of an extinct wallaby. So fragile was it that it broke in half as it came to the surface. After a few seconds I located a second bone, which proved to be the upper leg bone of the same animal. The site was clearly a promising one and I intended to return to it the next day with Geoff. The river rose overnight, however, making this impossible.
The river sites were interesting, for their sediments provided evidence that they had formed more than 40,000 years ago when glaciers reached near to the valley, which was then probably covered in periglacial tundra. Interestingly, the same two marsupial species (Maokopia and Protemnodon) present in the cave were also the only ones which we found in the river deposits.
By now, our rather extensive trekking in the valley, the base of which lay at 2,900 metres elevation, had prepared us for the thin air of the mountains.
The Prinz Willem V Range beckoned.
Our objective in climbing the range was to examine a rock-shelter known as Billingeek. The people of Kwiyawagi have used Billingeek as a hunting lodge for countless generations, and we hoped that we might learn something of the high-elevation fauna by visiting it.
The walk began spectacularly. We followed the Jalan Raya ('great road’, which was in fact a foot track) westward for several hours. This magnificent pathway, which traverses east–west along Irian Jaya's mountain spine, is an ancient trade route. In parts it is so well constructed that it resembles an Inca road, and would certainly be capable of admitting a small vehicle. In others, however, it dwindles to a muddy track which descends steep declivities, or else a line of slippery logs leading through a morass.
As we strode along a fine section of the track, I pondered the role it has played in the lives of the Kwiyawagi people. The Jalan Raya is one of the world's great foot-only trade routes. Produce, such as the plumes of birds of paradise, has probably travelled along it for millennia on its journey to places as far afield as Sri Lanka and China.
Kwiyawagi lies smack in the centre of the most deserted part of this route—about halfway between the major population centres of Ilaga and Wamena. Perhaps the people of Kwiyawagi have always opened their doors to weary travellers, operating a kind of mediaeval hostelry business. If so, then the idea of renting Pastor Hayward's house to visitors would be nothing new to them.
At mid-morning, we ran into a party of Lani travellers. Two men and two youths were coming from Ilaga, carrying salt and bird plumes to sell in the market in Wamena. They were magnificently dressed in traditional attire. Their skin glistened with sweat as they shouldered their load, while their long penis gourds and extravagant cassowary plume head-dresses surpassed anything I had seen.
The salt they carried had been made into rectangular cakes, each of which was carefully wrapped in immaculate pandanus leaves. The wrapping alone was a work of art. The salt had presumably been obtained from a brine soak somewhere in the mountains. The bird plumes, mostly from parrots and birds of paradise, were wrapped in sheaves of dried leaves, then placed into bamboo tubes.
It was sad to think that, if Indonesia's plans for a road network eventuates, these men may well make their next trip to Wamena in a crowded minibus, dressed in dirty European cast-offs. Their salt no doubt will be manufactured in Java and wrapped in plastic.
We met these men where the Jalan Raya passes through a miniature montane heathland growing on sand. Small orchids, rhododendrons, dwarfed Podocarpus and celery-top pines, wild raspberries and native blueberries grew scattered across the landscape, separated from each other by bare patches of fine, white sand. A bright orange and yellow orchid was particularly common, its flowers growing in bunches which looked like small flames from a distance. The travellers had picked these and thrust them in bunches through their pierced nasal septa, or woven them into their head-dresses.
We picked blueberries and raspberries, which were delicious to munch on as we moved along. This vegetation type is characteristic of much of the higher elevation country in Irian Jaya. Here it occurred at lower elevation and seemed to be maintained by the fires which were often lit by travellers beside the track.
Within an hour or so, the vegetation changed abruptly and we passed into a tall, cathedral-like forest of southern beech and southern pines. The Jalan Raya, here a raised, broad and well-maintained footway, ran through the stately trees in a straight line. The effect was one of sublime beauty. Not since seeing the redwoods of California, or the mountain ash of Victoria, had I experienced such magnificent trees existing in such harmony with a human roadway.
The Antarctic beech which formed most of the forest were clearly a mature stand of even-aged trees. They must have established themselves centuries ago, following some catastrophe, possibly a landslide, which destroyed all prior vegetation. Now they were towering giants, at least a metre in diameter and fifty metres in height. Strangely, there was virtually no understorey except for a carpet of ferns and a few bushes. One rarely encounters forests like this in Melanesia.
Emerging from the forest we turned south and began to ascend the flanks of the Prinz Willem V Range. The track rose steeply through a dense tangle of mossy upper montane forest, until finally, at about midday, we left the trees behind and emerged into true alpine heath. To my chagrin, my old foe altitude sickness was beginning to affect me, producing headaches and general weakness, so I was grateful to discover that the track flattened out here. After a few more hours stumbling through a boggy but beautiful tundra-like environment we arrived at Billingeek.
The rockshelter is a long, undercut recess which sits on the side of a crater-like depression. At one time this may have been a glacial tarn (the point where glaciers originate), but the ice had melted long ago, leaving a miniature landscape of small lakes and rises.
The roof of the rockshelter was formed of a hard layer of limestone. It formed a shelf a metre or two thick, and on its upper surface grew a profusion of flowering plants, including dwarf umbrella trees, rhododendrons and many other species. Bloom-laden branches overhung the entrance, partially shielding the interior from the wind and rain. Even when it was bitterly cold outside, Billingeek could be as warm as toast.
As I levelled the floor in a far recess in order to set up my tent, a layer of ash and old animal bones was revealed in the sediment which comprised the rockshelter floor. Gingerly, I picked out a few pieces of charcoal with my Swiss army knife for radiocarbon dating and placed them, along with a few bones I had displaced, in a plastic bag.
The bones, I discovered, were almost entirely from Long-beaked Echidnas, tree-kangaroos, and pademelons. I was extremely excited by this, for neither living pademelons nor tree-kangaroos had ever been recorded from this part of Irian Jaya. I had high hopes that I might find them still alive in this remote area.
Billingeek was a magical place to stay. Each morning, after the hunters had left with their dogs, the birds would visit to feed on the flowers and berries of the plants overhanging the rockshelter mouth. Because of the darkness of the interior, they could not see us, and I watched them, enraptured, for hou
rs as they fed and quarrelled just a few feet away.
By far the commonest visitors were the Crested Berrypeckers (Paramythia montium). These are bold birds about the size of a starling. They are largely blue, but with a black crest, yellow rump and white eye-stripe. Nearly as common were several species of honeyeaters, including a lovely blackish bird with a short white beard: the Short-bearded Melidectes (Melidectes nouhuysi). Streaked Honeyeaters (Ptiloprora sp.) with bright green eyes abounded, as did a large, grey-green honeyeater with bluish patches of bare skin around the eyes. This was Belford's Melidectes (Melidectes belfordi). Robins, wagtails and a great variety of other birds also lived near the cave and sometimes visited. One day I was lucky enough to see the beautiful Painted Tiger-parrot (Psittacella picta), while on another occasion I saw my old friend, Macgregor's Bird of Paradise, in a Dacrycarpus pine growing just a few hundred metres from the shelter.
The animals which the hunters obtained intrigued me, for they were different from those represented by the bones I had found in the sediment. The species by far most frequently caught was the Coppery Ringtail. Near Billingeek, this large and usually arboreal possum was living in alpine scrub, where it often nested on the ground. Curiously, despite the fact that we caught about a dozen, there was not a single bone from this species in the ash-bed in the cave.
Day after day went by with no sign of wallabies being reported by our hunters. After much frustrating discussion with the Lani, using only my inadequate Bahasa Indonesia, I learned that they only ever encountered wallabies in the forest at lower elevation. It seems that the single species they were familiar with was the diminutive Mountain Dorcopsis (Dorcopsulus vanheurni).
The pademelons (genus Thylogale) I was looking for, which inhabit alpine grassland, were clearly long gone from the area. And hopes of finding living pademelons were ultimately dashed when, many months later, I received news from Geoff of the radiocarbon dates obtained from the charcoal of the deposit. It and the bones were 3,000 years old.