The Incredible Human Journey (19 page)

Some of these animals wouldn’t have proved too much of a challenge; molluscs could have been easily harvested from rivers and swamps, and modern hunters in the tropics have been reported taking porcupines, pangolins, monitor lizards and turtles simply by hand. I could believe this having seen the Lanoh girls plucking slippery fish out of Air Bah River.

Monkeys, though, are more difficult to hunt. The presence of monkey bones in the Niah Cave sediments showed that the humans were able to successfully hunt tree-living animals. There was no direct evidence to show that those hunter-gatherers had projectile technology, but, from what they were eating, they must have done. I thought back to the Lanoh’s blowpipes: entirely made out of organic material, they wouldn’t survive in the ground for very long. Anything made of bamboo or wood would be invisible to archaeologists looking for clues thousands of years later. It brought it home to me how incredibly difficult it is trying to find out what someone’s lifestyle was like when all that’s generally left are a few pieces of stone and bone.

The antiquity of both blowpipes and of the bow and arrow is still up for debate. There is no evidence of either being used this early, but this has to be balanced against the knowledge that most organic remains will have entirely perished. The earliest definite evidence for bow and arrow use comes from Europe, just 11,000 years ago, although some archaeologists argue that it may have been invented much earlier.
⁷
Bone and cartilage points were found at Niah, and it is possible that these may have been used as arrowheads.

The butchered pig bones in the cave also pointed to fairly sophisticated hunting technology – and a fondness for pork. Traditional ways of hunting pigs in modern Malaysia include using dogs and spears, blowpipes, bows and arrows, as well as ambushing and trapping. Dogs can be ruled out, as they were brought to Borneo only in the Neolithic. The other methods cannot be discarded, but without more archaeological evidence we can really only speculate about how those hunter-gatherers went about acquiring their game.

There were so many pig bones in Niah Cave that the archaeological team doing the twenty-first-century reassessment of the cave suggested that pig-hunting may have been the main reason that humans were drawn to the area. The bones were analysed to determine the age of the pigs being eaten: two-fifths of the bones to juvenile pigs. In modern Malaysia, pig populations boom and bust, following fluctuations in the fruiting of abundant tropical trees called Dipterocarps (from the Greek for two-winged fruit), which are themselves linked to weather cycles in the southern hemisphere. In years with bountiful fruit, wild pig populations can increase up to ten times in just a few months, and all that reproduction means a greater proportion of juvenile pigs around. Perhaps it was during these ‘good pig years’ that bands of hunter-gatherers would have set up seasonal camps in the mouth of Niah Cave, feasting on pork.
³

The monkey bones at Niah Cave also served as clues to what the environment would have been like at the time. They indicated that the area around Niah was forested, and this was corroborated by analysis of pollen in the Hell Trench sediments, which showed cycles of alternating mountainous and lowland rainforest. At around 40,000 years ago the environment would have been humid lowland rainforest, patchier than today as the climate was drier, although there would still have been plenty of rain.
^2
,
8
The middle of OIS 3, between 40,000 and 47,000 years ago, was an especially warm and wet period.
⁶
I visited Niah Cave in the middle of the wet season; there were frequent downpours in the afternoon, and, as I sat in the cave, keeping dry and looking out at the drenched rainforest, I imagined those early hunter-gatherers doing the same. When the rain stopped, the heat quickly lifted moisture from the trees to form wreaths of mist on the steep, forested slopes opposite the cave mouth.

It also looks like the hunter-gatherers knew how to make the most of rainforest plants as well, and had learnt to detoxify yams so that they were edible. Raw yam (
Dioscorea hispida
) is poisonous enough for a few mouthfuls to kill an adult, but yam fruit and seeds can be detoxified and made safe by burying them for a couple of weeks, then boiling them, or by burying the seeds for a longer period with ash. Barker’s team found pits containing ash and nut fragments, and inferred that the ancient hunter-gatherers may have been using the pit method of detoxification. There were also suggestions that the foragers had been managing the forest, using fire to clear areas: the archaeologists found particularly high levels of Acanthaceae (
Justicia
) pollen, which is among the first plants to recolonise fire-cleared areas in contemporary forest. In fact, there is evidence for wide use of burning of areas of dense wet tropical forest in South-East Asia between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago.
⁸

In recent history, hunter-gatherer tribes in South-East Asia were nomadic, forced to move around seasonally in order to exploit the thinly spread resources of the rainforest. From the evidence in Niah Cave it looks as though the ancient foragers were also roaming around, but returning again and again to the cave, which provided them with a base from which they could make forays out in search of food. Most of the evidence of human activity in the cave is in the form of the animal bones left after dinner. There are very few stone tools in the cave, but, as those that have been found were made of stone originating about 50km away, it makes sense that the hunter-gatherers wouldn’t have carelessly discarded tools when they left the cave. A few bone tools were also found in the archival material from Harrison’s dig, from the 33,000- to 46,000-year-old layer, in among the butchered animal bones. There were six pieces of worked bone, including one that had been sharpened to a point to form an awl or hole-making device.
³
Bone tools are seen as one of those things that characterise the Upper Palaeolithic, traditionally considered part of a more sophisticated technology and culture that emerged with the Aurignacian in Europe about 40,000 years ago. However, we have already seen that this apparent ‘revolution’ may have had its roots much earlier, in Africa, and that the first humans leaving Africa may have already been making sophisticated tools, including mounting bone points on shafts.

Although there were no refined stone tools, or evidence of ornament or art, comparable to the European Upper Palaeolithic, Barker argued that the ingenuity, resourcefulness and forward-planning implied by the archaeology at Niah show just as ‘modern’ an approach to life. The foragers of Niah were certainly displaying an ability to exploit a great range of resources: they were probably trapping animals, using some sort of projectile technology for hunting, detoxifying yams and clearing areas of forest using fire. The ability to survive in the rainforest would have helped humans spread through South-East Asia, but they were not alone in the region; as they spread, they would start encroaching on the territories of earlier humans.
²

The Hobbit: Flores, Indonesia

In the last decade the most exciting new addition to the story of human evolution has been the discovery of the remains of diminutive people who lived on the Indonesian island of Flores. It was an event that rocked the world of palaeoanthropology, as well as making news headlines. It was presented as the find of the century, but what really caught public attention was that here was evidence of a different species of human – living at the same time as modern humans. The Hobbits had been on their Indonesian island until as recently as 12,000 years ago. Although we are familiar with this idea in Europe, that there were still Neanderthals knocking around when modern humans arrived on the scene, it’s something that still comes as a bit of a surprise, and even sends a shiver down the spine. We are very used to the idea that we are the only human species on the planet today (although, genetically, there is actually a good argument for chimpanzees and gorillas being included in
Homo
as well). Some even feel that we are so unlike other animals as to be a special creation. When we start finding other species that challenge our uniqueness, it unsettles that illusion. At the time of the discovery, Chris Stringer said, ‘It’s remarkable, astonishing, sensational, even … It challenges the whole idea of what it is that makes us human.’ The idea that there could have been (and some think still
are
) other people, not quite human, sharing the planet with us, is somehow spooky. Even spookier are the myths from Flores, of Ebu Gogo: small creatures that inhabited caves, and provoked suspicion and fear among Floresian villagers.

In 1995, Mike Morwood and Doug Hobbs were on the Kimberley coast in north-west Australia, excavating an eighteenth-century site where Indonesian fishermen had boiled up sea cucumbers, ready to sell to the Chinese as a delicacy. But contact between Asia and Australia stretched back much further, way beyond historical records. The first Australians would have arrived from Indonesia. So, the archaeologists started to plot an excavation in Indonesia – to search for the early modern human colonisers of the region and the ancestors of the first Australians.
¹

The Indonesian island of Flores seemed like a good place to start: ancient stone tools had already been found there, and Mike Morwood could team up with Indonesian palaeontologists and archaeologists who were working there. And there already seemed to be something a bit intriguing, something that ‘didn’t quite fit’ about Flores. Throughout the Pleistocene, Flores was always an island, separated by deepwater sea channels from it nearest neighbours, Bali, Lombok and Sumbawa. And it’s generally thought that modern humans are the only hominins who managed to make sea crossings. But the tools that had previously been discovered on Flores seemed too ancient to have been made by modern humans. Then there was some doubt as to whether they were really stone tools at all.

Digging in 1997, the international team found definite stone tools, embedded in volcanic tuff of the Soa Basin, and got secure dates on them. The tools dated to between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago. This finding was important enough to get into
Nature
. Morwood suggested that these tools must have been made by
Homo erectus
, as that was the only hominin known to be around in South-East Asia at that time. But that meant
Homo erectus
had made a sea crossing. It was a controversial claim.

In the following years work continued in the Soa Basin, but the team also branched out to investigate a couple of cave sites where previous excavations had turned up some, much more recent, evidence of modern humans, including burials and stone artefacts from the last 10,000 years. In April 2001, excavations started at Liang Bua, ‘the cool cave’. A team of local Manggarai people had been taken on as excavators, digging with trowels and bamboo stakes, then swapping them for sledge hammers and chisels to get through layers of hard flowstone. The excavation went deeper than previous digs had done; the sides of the trench were carefully shored up as they went down. Morwood was not satisfied with stopping at layers that looked ‘sterile’, or untouched by any signs of human activity: he wanted to get down to bedrock. And he was rewarded. In deep layers, they found thousands of stone tools, animal bones and teeth. Bert Roberts dated the remains and found them to be between 74,000 and 12,000 years old. A strange, small and rather curved hominin radius was the only apparently human bone found in that first digging season.

In 2003 the digging team turned up what they thought was the skeleton of a
Homo erectus
child: it was a very exciting find. The skull was thick, with a sloping forehead, which fitted with
Homo erectus
, and it was very small. The skeleton hadn’t been deliberately buried; the body had somehow ended up in a shallow pool in the cave and become quickly covered over, so that the bones were preserved. The bones were not fossilised and were very mushy; the team used a mixture of UHU glue and acetone nail polish remover to consolidate the fragile bones so that they could be lifted. But when the bones were properly cleaned up it became evident that Liang Bua skeleton number 1 (LB1) wasn’t a child at all, but a
tiny
adult.

Peter Brown, Professor of Palaeoanthropology at the University of New England, flew out with Mike Morwood to Jakarta to examine the tiny skeleton. Using mustard seeds, which he poured into the skull, Peter Brown found the braincase was astonishingly small: just 380ml. Anything in the genus
Homo
is expected to have an adult brain size of at least 600ml, based on previous fossils, and modern humans have brains anywhere between 1000 and 2000ml. Big brains are a fundamental characteristic of humans. Small brains can be caused by pathological conditions, such as microcephaly, but even then it’s unusual to end up with a brain volume of less than 600ml. The oldest known hominin fossils outside Africa, from Dmanisi in Georgia, dating to 1.8 million years ago, are small-bodied and small-brained (with a stature of 1.4m and brain size of 600ml), but are still nowhere near as small as LB1.

Peter Brown did not think the skeleton was pathological, neither did he think it was
Homo erectus
. In fact, he originally wanted to give it a brand new genus and species name:
Sundanthropus tegakensis
. LB1 was something very strange indeed: a tiny hominin that Peter Brown thought looked even closer to the ancient African australopithecines than to any member of the
Homo
genus. Morwood, though, in spite of the tiny brain size of LB1, thought there were enough traits in the skeleton to label her
Homo
.
¹
And then there was the behaviour: tool-making is not meant to pre-date
Homo
. In 2004, the find was published in
Nature
: ‘a new small-bodied hominin’, named
Homo floresiensis
.
²
Morwood and his colleagues suggested that this species had derived from an ancestral population of
Homo erectus
, which had become isolated on Flores, with the whole population undergoing ‘endemic dwarfing’.