Chapter 26
THE CAMP
The exact position of the base camp had been decided with the Tuay, who had gently insisted that the toing and froing to the cave, that lay further upstream, should not to interfere with the daily life of the longhouse. It was set-up on the opposite bank of the river, in one of the small clearings that the Ibans cultivated on the slopes along side the river, where they grew rice, fruit, vegetable and also pepper that they sold in the local markets downriver. The mountain rice had been harvested and the field had been offered by the Tuay to set up the base, it was ideal just one hundred metres up river of the Nanga Garing Longhouse.
The longhouse was the home of a dozen or so families, it was typical of an upriver longhouse, a long rectangular wooden structure built on stilts by the riverbank, a wide enclosed corridor overlooked the river side and a series of biliks at the back facing onto the hillside with the doors opening onto the communal area on the river side. It was situated on the banks of one of the many branches of the upper Kapuas River, a small paradise that had probable been unchanged for generations, small children played in the transparent waters of the river watched over by the women as they went about their daily tasks.
With the help of hired labour brought up from Lanjak all the field material was carried up to the site including a diesel generator and supplies of fuel, as well as bottled gas for the kitchen. Electricity was vital for lighting, as night fell not long after six in the evening on the equator. It was necessary for the expedition members to work in the evenings writing up reports and analysing the work of the day.
The camp consisted of tents for sleeping quarters, a kitchen complete with a good Chinese-Malaysian cook, who Indra, the logistics manager, had hired to ensure that at least he ate well. There were washing and toilet facilities, a diesel generator, storage areas, and a field laboratory equipped satellite communication equipment. Using digital photography and laser measuring devices all data could be downloaded into a computer and transferred by satellite to Jakarta or Paris. Access to the caves was by a path that led uphill reinforced with wooden steps and hand rails by the Ibans and the hired labour brought up from Lanjak.
Each day they crossed the river over a makeshift bridge and made their way up the hill to the cave after breakfast, before the heat of the day that made the going difficult. Because of the distance from the base camp a permanent work station was set up at the discovery site, equipped with all the necessary equipment and a second, smaller, generator to provide lighting and power for work inside the caves. It also included quarters for the guards and a mess to serve lunch and light meals.
A British archaeologist, Collin Williams, was head of the excavation work. He was an old hand, whose speciality seemed to be out of the way sites. He had arrived in the early afternoon from Pontianak at the small airport at Sintang on the Kapuas River; he was accompanied by a younger map who was the expedition’s geologist. They were driven to a longhouse that acted as a staging post, for the expedition and had been named, lower base longhouse, it was located about two hours away from Putissibau depending on the weather and the state of the road, peppered with huge potholes and deep ruts, plus the risks the Indonesian driver took before he was warned to take it easy by his frightened passengers. From there it was another two hours up the complex river system to the Nanga Garing Longhouse in three perau, the long narrow boats powered by powerful motors, which zigzagged through the rapids. “A hard experience on the arse,” Colin remarked drawing heavily one of the English cigarettes to which he was highly addicted. The boats were fast and manoeuvrable, their only means of getting team members and their personal baggage and material up and down between the bases. The main equipment and supplies took more than two weeks to ferry up to the base.
Pierre Ros had flown in from Pontianak the previous evening after spending almost a week with Kim Adyatman, one of Aris’s men, collecting materials and the permits necessary for the team’s stay in Kalimantan Barat. That had given them time to get over their jet lag and acclimatise themselves to the tropical weather.
The heat and humidity took a more than a little time to get used to, especially for those who had not experienced an equatorial climate.
They waited in the longhouse sitting on the bamboo floor talking with the chief, who welcomed his guests with a powerful home made tuak, an alcohol made from fermented rice. The chief was pleased, whatever certain of the elders had said about the strangers, their arrival and the work they would give them in the cave would improve the fortune of the longhouse, enabling their children to go to school and to buy the things of the towns: an outboard motors and a generator that would provide them with electricity for a fridge and radio set. He was pleased with his decision and he would prepare a welcome celebration for the new arrivals.
That evening the visitors crossed the shallow river in their inflatable dinghies to the Iban longhouse where they were greeted by the chief and his men who were wearing their traditional fineries; necklaces, armbands, bracelets with head dresses of feather and flowers. Both the men and women were dressed in sarongs woven by the longhouse women on body looms, from plant fibres spun and dyed by methods handed down by their parents, decorated in the traditional patterns that represented the passage through life.
Many of the Ibans were tattooed with natural dyes collected from plants and insects in the forest. The tattoos were made with nail points hammered into their skin, it was part of the Iban tradition and it was normal to suffer a little to attain beauty. The other advantage they explained was that bad spirits were frightened away by their tattoos of birds, bows and arrows. The chief proudly told them that they were great hunters and always brought back to the longhouse freshly killed monkeys and wild pig. He then offered Pierre a local delicacy, huge finger thick grilled larva presented on a palm leaf that he popped into his mouth with no more ado and washed it back with a mouthful of tuak. The headman told them that the larvae were cultivated on sago palms left to rot in the forest.
The old men recounted their history, passed by word of mouth from generation to generation, of how they had survived in adversity, overcoming sickness and disease, of their great head men and heroes, their tribal wars and their proud victories and of natural disaster.
The visitors were fascinated by the account of their history, of countless generations of Ibans who had lived undisturbed in their forest home. The glasses were filled and refilled with tuak by the chief who was equally fascinated by these strange men, he watched the red face of Pierre Ros and his small, bristling, moustache, small red eyes behind wire framed glasses, which reminded him of the wild pig he hunted in the forest. Pierre for his part warmed by the strong drink started to recount to the willing listeners his theories on the survival of early men, who had lived until recent times, theories ridiculed by most of his serious colleagues.
‘There’s a wealth of stories about strange men like creatures in the forests,’ he told them.
‘Bigfoot!’ laughed Ennis.
‘No, I’m serious, strange manlike creatures have been regularly reported as far back as 1855 by travellers and adventurers.’
‘What do you think?’
‘Me? Well to a certain degree I have an open mind. For example there’s the Orang Pendek that’s been described as a powerful bipedal ape-like creature and was spotted in Sumatra recently by a photographer called Debbie Martyr.’
‘So there’s some photos?’
‘I’m not sure, from what I’ve read it’s supposed to be something like an orang-utan. Similar stories abound in this very area where we are at present, in the mountains between Sumatra and Kalimantan, the animal has even been observed to break river snails using a rock to eat them.’
‚So it’s an intelligent ape.’
‘In any case it’s supposed to be very fast on its feet.’
‘The point is not whether such a creature is linked to erectus who is very similar to us but that unknown animals have remained undetected from men for a very l
ong time, surviving deep in the forest. So why is it unreasonable to think that Homo erectus, a very intelligent early human, had not survived until historic times?’
‘Villagers on the Island of Flores say that up until a hundred years or so ago, there were small, one metre tall hairy people who used to steal their food,’ said Pierre.
‘The little people,’ Ennis laughed.
‘Well they were known as the Ebu Gogos, that means I’m told, grandmothers who eat anything,’ he said seriously. ‘The legend says they were left in peace by the villagers, that is until the Ebu Gogos stole a baby and ate it. Local folklore says they existed until sometime in the nineteenth century and that they could talk some kind of language and copied parrot-like the talk of the villagers.’
‘I suppose it’s because we have become used to the idea that prehistoric men lived tens or hundreds of thousand years ago.’
The next morning after a breakfast briefing they crossed the river and could see the longhouse families were already about their daily business downstream. On the opposite bank they joined the trail to the site that lay an arduous one hour up trek further upstream. The trail ran through the dense rainforest gradually climbing up to the cave entrance where they arrived drenched in sweat and panting for breath. The forest along the way was eerily quiet only the occasional sound of monkeys whooping in the canopy high above them broke the silence.
The morning trek up to the discovery cave through the rainforest was an incredible spectacle to those who spent a good part of their life sitting behind desks, whether in Paris or Jakarta. The huge dominant trees towered above the forest, caught in a never ending fight for light with creepers and stranglers that grasped at their huge trunks in their struggle for survival. The floor of the forest was covered with a dense vegetation of every imaginable form and shade of green, a violent contrast with the black and brown of dead and dying plants.
The walk was also a daily exercise for the team since most of them spent the day on their knees scraping the floor in search of evidence or seated at field tables examining their finds under magnifying glasses or microscopes. The new comers on their first trek to the cave collapsed under the awnings that had been set up around the entrance, displaying a sudden interest in their notebooks and the contents of their back packs as they sought to recover their breath.
At the entrance to the cave three guards who had been positioned to protect it from unwelcome intruders stood drinking tea from plastic mugs. The surroundings had been cleared of vegetation and the secondary camp had been installed for the guards with an observer appointed by the governor’s office.
The entrance to the rock shelter was broad and high, it had been overhung by thick vegetation that had been cut back for ease of access and light. The deposits did not appear to be very deep from the trial bore holes that had been drilled. The broad natural platform at the entrance had been reinforced with hardwood planks brought up river from a Korean sawmill at Lanjak so as to make the going easier. Each day at night fall the rain arrived like clockwork making the going slippery and almost impracticable, the heavy downpour turning the site into a mud bath in a few brief minutes. As a result the rule was all shoes be removed before entering the excavation area to keep it clean and to avoid unwanted pollution by foreign matter.
Inside the cave walkways and footbridges had been built to protect the floor surface and lighting had been rigged-up which made little impression on the gloom of the vast gallery, the roof lost in the dark dome high above the cave floor. There was a constant movement with the darting of tiny swiftlets that gave way later in the day to bats.
From the Indonesian side a large part of the floor was covered with pungent deposits of guano that had built up over thousands of years by the birds and bats that had made the cave their home. A boardwalk led into the rear of the cave where test holes had been made in preparation for the main excavation near to the spot where Ennis had discovered the calvarium.
The caves that lay under the limestone cliffs were part of an underground drainage system that had been formed by the erosion of the limestone over hundreds of thousands of years, part of what geologist describe as tropical karst or limestone rock that can be dissolved by water.
Most cave floors consist of deposits that have accumulated over thousands of years, composed of dust and the remains of vegetable matter blown in by the wind and carried by air currents, mixed with rock and debris fallen from the roofs and walls. The streams that drain the rain water from the surface also carried in sand and pebbles. Many different animals live or venture into such caves; birds, bats and small mammals that leave their droppings and sometimes their bones whilst carnivores often used the caves for shelters leaving behind the bones of their prey.
The accumulated deposits in caves can be anything from a few centimetres to several metres thick. In the famous Zhoukoudian caves in China or Atapuerca in Spain, there are dozens of metres of thick breccia cemented together by the mineralised water that permeated through the accumulated debris drying and hardening it over hundreds and thousands of years.
The action of the stream that flowed through the discovery cave had cut into the breccia taking the path of least resistance through a more friable agglomerate with large stones and rocks jutting out of the uneven sides.
The island of Borneo, an ancient seabed, rose out of the sea fifteen million years ago, was composed of sandstone, mudstone and limestone. Some three million years later tectonic forces in the earths crust deformed what had been the sea bed, creating the present day hills and mountains. In places the bedrock folded and broke forming craggy limestone hills and outcroppings on which trees and plants grew pushing their roots down, opening deep crevices in the rocky surface into which rain water drained over countless millennium, cutting new channels into the caves and carrying in natures debris.
In the mountains of equatorial Kalimantan the karst landscape was formed by the dissolution of the underlying sedimentary limestone rock, and the constant tropical rains and the streams that drained the mountains and valleys. Rain water becomes weakly acidic as it reacts chemically with the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the soil, thus forming carbonic acid that seeps downward through the soil and through cracks and fractures in the rock, dissolving the limestone rock, composed of calcium carbonate, along its fissures, thus forming caves and passages over hundreds of thousands of years.
In tropical regions like Kalimantan with its massive limestone bedrock, a remarkably distinctive landscape had been formed by nature with jagged hills forming isolated spires and pinnacles, pointing towards the sky and dominating the surrounding forest.
Certain of these caves became the dwelling place of Homo erectus when he reached Borneo, one million or more years ago. He had lived in the rain forest as a hunter gatherer using the limestone caves for shelter. He was another animal and had no more effect on the ecosystems than any other of the forest dwellers. Perhaps it was he who drove the orang-utan from the forest floor into the trees to become the largest truly arboreal animal on earth, though fossils have shown that this great ape was larger in the Pleistocene period and had other physical characteristics, witness to a terrestrial past.
As they trekked up the hillside towards the cave the dark grey weathered pinnacles of limestone seemed to reach out of the dark forest like a living force. The only noise besides the tramp of their feet and the pumping of breath was the noise of insects and birds, from time to time hoots of a monkey echoed through the forest or a cloud of butterflies wove their way through the kaleidoscope of leaves and branches, gliding and dipping like a spray of colourful confetti.
The area they had selected for the archaeological dig lay off to the right of the cave mouth where Ennis had discovered the skull. The daily work included sieving to recover evidence and clues to be analysed by the specialists on the past inhabitants of the cave and their activities. But it was a tedious business and with the slightest lack of concentration vital clues could disappear for ever. r />
A sample cut had been made into the floor of the cave to explore the stratigraphic structure of the floor but it merely showed that the base rock floor was less than two metres beneath the surface of the cave. The galleries and tunnels had been cut into the limestone rock by the action of water over hundreds of thousands of years and were typical of the region, but the various stratas had been formed by the accumulation of flood debris in much more recent times.
The difficulty was to determine the stratigraphic boundaries and their limits to avoid errors in the interpretation of data. Without an understanding of the precise location of a piece of evidence and its context, an artefact for example would become a mere museum piece without any historical context. A strict and meticulous organisation was imposed to ensure that each bucket that arrived at the sieves was associated with its precise point of excavation, so that the results of the sieve could be analysed with scientific exactitude.
The visual examination of the cave floor and the exposed sediments had produced no evidence of human activities. There were no tools of any nature and the other bones were those of small animals of a recent period.
Further exploration of the various tunnels and galleries indicated the cave had been subject to flash floods and on several occasions with debris being transported by the waters indicating the frequent collapse of the cave roof, this debris had formed the deposits that covered the bones.
Lundy postulated that borneensis had been an isolated individual, killed in an unlucky accident; a member of a vestige population that had survived long after modern man had established himself throughout Australasia.
They explored the hill side as best they could in the dense undergrowth of the rainforest, it was possible that borneensis could have fallen into a crevice and been killed by the fall. His remains were scattered by flood waters with skull parts being deposited at the spot where Ennis had found them and covered by rubble as the flood subsided, subsequent floods had further continued the burial process. The crevice into which he had fallen had with the passage of time been overgrown by vegetation and gradually filled by earth and rubble washed in rains until it was fully sealed.
For Pierre Ros it was impossible that borneensis had been alone, he could by an infinitesimally small chance have been the very last of his species, but his mother had lived at the latest until he had reached puberty and his father to the moment of his conception. Given the early child bearing age and the relatively short lives of primitive forest dwellers the grandparents may have possibly been alive at his birth.
It was more logical that family groups had existed and no doubt a small population, living in a territory of a hundred or so, square kilometres, dwelling nearby riverbanks, as do present populations. Individuals did not stray far from their families indicating that other bones could have survived the centuries be found in the area.
Dating estimates of the cores taken at different points on the site were made by the team’s specialists confirmed their initial estimates with radiocarbon methods, optically stimulated luminescence, uranium series and electron spin resonance.
If the dating was indeed exact then three thousand years was not very far back into the past and it was certainly possible that he and his family were not the last of their species, which could have continued to survive until very recent historic times when Western adventurers started to explore Borneo in the mid-nineteenth century. In the much more recent past and especially since the seventies, oil and mineral exploration companies, and more especially the timber companies, had destroyed huge swathes of the natural forest pushing those remaining tribal peoples deeper and deeper into the interior. These same peoples still recount legends of meets with strange men.
‘Ah! Carbon 14,’ said Pierre as they speculated over dating of what appeared to be fragments of charcoal; perhaps the remains of what could have been a camp fire. ‘To be more precise it’s called Radiocarbon C14, now that’s an interesting tool for us who are interested in natural sciences. It works like a stop-watch, and it starts with death!’
‘Well I hope mine doesn’t start too soon!’ said Aris.
Pierre smilingly ignored the remark and continued. ‘When a living being dies the stop-watch starts ticking and it’s good for up to about seventy thousand years.’
‘What happens after that?’
‘Unfortunately the quantities of Carbon 14 become too small and immeasurable.’
‘A pity.’
‘Nevertheless it’s fine for dating relatively recent organic material such as bones, there are plenty of other methods for older bones and non-organics.’
‘How exactly does carbon dating work?’
‘Well without going into a long lecture it’s like this, radioactive material is by definition unstable, so over time it decays down to what we call a daughter product. In the case of C-14 about fifty percent of the original material decays within 5,715 years. We call this the half-life. If you know how much C-14 was present when the animal died and measure how much there is now, you can calculate how long ago the animal died. This is valid for all organic material, both plants and animals.’
The science of dating had always been at the core of geology and palaeontology. Fossil sequences were recognized in the early nineteenth century when the first geologists observed that fossils were always found in sequences or strategraphic layers, meaning that certain groups of fossils were always found below others.
At that time a fellow called William Smith, who was a canal surveyor, discovered that rocks could be mapped on the basis of the fossils he found in them and he remarked that the sequences in one part of the country could be matched with those in another. So this became the first principles of stratigraphy: older rocks lie below younger rocks and the fossils found in the rocks occurred in a predictable order.
This observation formed the basis from which the divisions of geological time were made. Every school boy knows these, though more likely from films such as ‘Jurassic Park’ than his class work. Divisions such as Jurassic, Cretaceous, Tertiary and others were defined by specific groups of fossils and what was more surprising was the system was valid for the entire planet.
As scientific knowledge progressed geologists remarked that fossils became more complex through time. The oldest rocks contained no fossils, then simple sea creatures appeared, followed by more complex life forms such as fish, then life appeared on land with reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals, until finally in the last seconds of geological time man appeared.
When Charles Darwin published his work The Origin of the Species it was clear that fossils were evidence of evolution had occurred all through the history of the earth. Today, palaeontologists have explored every corner of the earth in their search for fossils and have found nothing to contradict the law of continuous evolutionary development.
Botanists and biologists have established phylogenetic or family trees for every group of plants and animals, showing how all the different species are related to each other on the basis of their morphological or genetic characteristics. This shows that the fossil record tells the same story as do the genetic characteristics of all living organisms.
Until about a century ago relative dating was the only method available. Then, after the discovery of radioactivity, it was observed that predictable natural decay takes place in naturally occurring radioactive isotopes, this meant that many organic and inorganic materials could be dated with precision. These isotopes are radioactive elements that decay, or break down, at precise and predictable rates. The unit of measure is the half-life of such elements, meaning that the time taken for half of a radioactive element to break down to a stable non-radioactive element.
Therefore, by comparing the proportions of elements in a sample or rock or organic matter, its age can be calculated. Carbon-14 dating is used for dating organic materials and is the most common of these techniques. C-14 is an isotope that is continuously produced in the upper atmosphere of the earth and starts to decay immediately. However
, the problem is that it is limited to organic materials less than about 70,000 old. A few milligrams of organic material can produce reliable results.
This mechanics of this method are based on the fact that living organisms, such as plants for example absorb radioactive C-14 from the atmosphere as they grow by photosynthesis absorbing carbon dioxide. Three isotopes are produced from carbon, two of which are stable C-12 and C-13, and C-14 which is unstable and decays.
As a result all living organisms absorb carbon-14, accumulating the isotope in their tissues during the course of their brief lives. When they die the absorption of C-14 instantly ceases, however, the decay of C-14 continues at a precise rate, this enables scientists to determine the age of organic remains such as bone, hair, skins, or wood.
C-14 is part of a broader technology called radiometric dating that uses several other isotopes that have very long half-lives, ranging from 0.7 to 48.6 billion years. Thus small differences in the relative proportions of two isotopes can provide dates for rocks of almost any age with only a one percent error. Amongst the radiometric dating techniques for rocks is the potassium-argon method that can be used for rock older than 100,000 years old.
Another method is by comparing fossils to fossils of the same species on different sites that have been dated by absolute methods. In the case of a hominid skull with a certain cranial capacity it could be compared to the cranial capacity of another fossil hominid skull found at another site that has been absolutely dated. However, this method can be unreliable if in two geographical areas, such as Java and Borneo, the species evolved at different rates.
The most conventional method is superposition and stratigraphy, this technique only indicates that a particular fossil is younger or older than another fossil. However, if the position of the fossil has moved, as the result of tectonic change, or in much more recent times floods and landslides, or the collapse of caves, then the information can be very misleading.