The Lost Forest

by John Francis Kinsella

  Chapter 16

  SARAWAK

  The Sarawak Museum had one of the finest ethnological collections in Borneo dedicated to the native ethnic groups found in Sarawak and its neighbouring regions.

  The population counted a total of twenty seven ethnic groups: the native peoples of Borneo, the Malays and ethnic Chinese. The Ibans were part of a group known to anthropologists and historians as Proto-Malays, or for Malaysia, Bumiputras, ‘sons of the soil’, whose ancestors had migrated from Yunnan in China about 2500BC, they formed the largest ethnic group with about thirty percent of the state’s total population. Until the middle of the twentieth they had always led a semi-nomadic life and were famous for being former head-hunters. Many of the Ibans lived in the Batang Lupar River Basin.

  Those who lived ‘upriver’, called the Orang Ulu, in reality consisted of many different tribal groups, including the Kayahs, Kenyahs, Kelabits and Penans.

  The Penans lived deep in the forests of the mountainous regions that straddled the border between Sarawak and Kalimantan. Their way of life had remained unchanged for thousands of years. They hunted with blow pipes and darts tipped with a deadly poison made from the sap of the Ipoh tree. At the end of the twentieth century very few Penans were nomadic as the grandfathers had been.

  Evidence shows that modern Homo sapiens first entered into what is now Borneo some forty thousand years ago during the Pleistocene era, when the level of the sea was considerably lower than today and Borneo formed part of the Asian mainland. The region had at that time been occupied by Homo erectus for almost two million years.

  In the millenniums that followed the arrival of the first wave of modern Homo sapiens others arrived overland when the conditions allowed and by sea, island hopping, when the Borneo was again separated from the mainland. Then new peoples came from the Asian mainland about seven thousand years ago when navigation in outrigger canoes was invented. Those peoples came down from what is now Malaysia; they were forest dwellers living in or on the edge of the tropical forests that covered the region for millions of years.

  They were territorial hunter gatherers, whose territory was delimited by language and by ethnicity, living in family related groups in nearby and overlapping territories. The family related groups did not develop an evolved tribal structure until very much more recent times. These groups defended their territories against intruders and they themselves would have been a grave risk if they strayed into the territory of a group not closely related to their own family.

  Family groups could live off a territory that could provide them with the game and edible plants needed to support their numbers. When food and game was plentiful they lived in harmony with their neighbours but when food became scarce competition increased leading to conflict with other groups. The nomadic hunter gatherers limited their territory to a region they knew with its recognisable landmarks, rocks, vegetation, large trees, rivers and swamps. The knowledge of their territory ensured the success of the hunt and a regular supply of plants and fruit.

  As the geographical distance between groups increased, the fewer were their ties of kinship as dialects evolved, changing with the distance, until they reached a point when they became mutually incomprehensible. The natural barriers that separated related groups from other populations, such as mountains and broad rivers, led to the development of widely different languages as can be still seen today in Papua New Guinea.

  The life of hunter gatherers remained unchanged for millennium until the arrival of early traders from China and India who sailed along the coast of Borneo in the seventh century, expanding their source of exotic goods. Their arrival caused little change or no change to the lives of most of the tribes who lived inland from the coast.

  Those who lived in deep the dark forests that covered the whole of Borneo continued their nomadic way of life amongst many strange creatures and plants, some of which were found nowhere else on earth: orang-utans, proboscis monkeys, giant monitor lizards, tiny mouse deer, forest elephants, rhinoceros and tigers, giant trees and flowers…and another species of man.

  When Europeans finally visited Borneo in the thirteenth century small coastal towns were already well established, but the interior remained hidden by a heavy veil of mystery. Few outsiders dared venture into such dark and menacing forests. Exotic goods were carried down the myriads of rivers by the natives in perogues to the coast, where they were exchanged against metals and earthenware pottery.

  As the traders, Arabs, Indians and Chinese, slowly established upriver stations, tribal peoples were attracted and built their longhouses nearby the trading posts creating villages. Gradually exchange between the coast and the interior grew as the people of the interior ventured beyond their traditional boundaries, discovering new routes to the coast through the forest and along its rivers.

  It is just possible that when foreign traders first appeared on the shore of Borneo, the last remaining Homo erectus were pushed from their ultimate refuge, hunted and exterminated by men who saw erectus as little more than another creature of the forest.

  Pierre Ros’s expounded his now realistic theories to the French Ambassador in Jakarta at their bunker like Embassy on Jalan Thamrin. Dominique de Pazowski, the ambassador was one of the typically arrogant cocks that seemed omnipresent in the French diplomatic corps, strutting about the local stage puffed up with his own importance. He appeared affronted that a few scientific compatriots had stolen his prerogative concerning relations with the Indonesian government.

  The evidence that Homo erectus did indeed live until relatively recent historical times would be sensational news to the scientific community was lost on the ambassador.

  ‘You see the age of the fossils here in Java indicate that Homo erectus lived perhaps as little as twenty seven thousand years ago,’ Pierre explained.

  ‘What are you getting at?’ asked the Embassy’s scientific attaché.

  ‘I mean that he could have continued to survive much longer, the bones found were not those of the last remaining representative of his species, were they now?’ Pierre said with a condescending smile.

  ‘You mean the creature whose bones you turned up?’

  ‘No, not our deceased friend. Here!’

  ‘In Java then?’ questioned de Pazowski.

  ‘I see,’ the attaché replied confused.

  Pierre saw the scientific attaché as a career diplomat who new nothing of anthropology and a lackey of the insufferable de Pazowski.

  ‘Yes, those in Java. If you were to look at all the fossil humanoid bones discovered in the world to this day, those on which we expound our wonderful theories, then they are really incredibly few. I guess there are probably about a thousand at the most that date previous to Late Palaeolithic, the older ones could be put into an average sized cardboard packing case,’ he said stretching his hands in demonstration.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Don’t be inpatient cher ami, I getting there, be it slowly!’ Pierre said smiling at the attaché’s impatience.

  ‘Let me explain. On this earth live some six billion human beings, and in all the history of the so called human race only ten billion have existed, including the six billion that exist today! Surprising n’est pas? At the time of the Roman Empire the population of the world has been estimated at around one hundred million. If we look at the period prior to the beginning of written human history, say seven thousand years before the present, then perhaps the population of the world was only ten million and up to the invention of agriculture about ten thousand years ago it was only one million!’

  ‘I follow,’ said the attaché.

  ‘That’s dam few!’ said the ambassador surprised for once at his own ignorance

  ‘Indeed, so if each generation is calculated generously at twenty years, then from the beginning of agriculture five thousand generations existed until the beginning of human civilisation, and not more than two generations lived at any one time, baring exceptions…old people were unknown. So our one mill
ion humans represented two generations each having half a million persons. This population remained remarkably constant until the appearance of agriculture. Well fifty generations at half a million per generation, let me see, that makes twenty five million, then if we go back to two million years before the present that makes one hundred thousand generations.,” he smiled, pleased with his little presentation.

  ‘If I get you that means that only one hundred million hominids had lived on earth up until the beginning of civilisation…let me see,” said the attaché, “That means your one thousands fossils represent only one individual for every one hundred thousand men that lived.’

  ‘So you see what I’m getting at?’

  ‘Hmm...,’ muttered de Pazowski looking at his watch and a little lost. The ambassador realised that he had to play this game carefully, if these grubby little scientists were right then he would have a leading role to play, presenting France as a leader in a very mediatised scientific field, with public announcements and TV presentations, especially since Indonesia had become the focus of world news with current political and economic crisis. It irked him that Ennis, a subject of Her Britannic Majesty, an ancestral enemy, was involved, but when the new Indonesian government arrived, as it surely would, given then turn of events, whoever they were, they would certainly use any sensational scientific discovery to distract the country’s attention from the economic and political turmoil that had overtaken them, and that is where he, the Ambassador of France, would step in, introducing his government as a valuable cultural and scientific partner.

  ‘What I’m saying is that our fossils cannot possibly represent the last of that race, can they now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see the point,’ said the ambassador, ‘the fossils are a very very isolated representative of a population that existed over a very long period of time!’

  ‘Exactly, one of the most important questions that we have not seriously addressed is the disappearance of our ancestors and this discovery could throw light on the subject. We talk of evolution, mutations and a multitude of other theories but there are other vital questions.

  ‘After all if we consider it for a moment relatively few populations have actually disappeared in historic times. Take the Indians of North America, the Aztecs or Mayas of Mexico, the Incas of Peru, the Aborigines of Australia or the Inuit’s of the Artic the list is long. They were murdered, their civilisations destroyed, but the peoples lived on.’

  The ambassador became alert, that sounded like politics, a subject that was not to be meddled with by scientists, especially as East Timor had become a burning question, with the troubles in the street just a few blocks from the embassy buildings.

  ‘So what happened to Homo erectus, were his genes incompatible?’

  ‘That’s not so sure. There were other closely related populations of man, very closely related. Their genes were possibly but not totally different or incompatible. But the different populations could have evolved at different rates, given the isolation of individual groups. The changes would have been in isolated pockets and backwaters, leaving these groups unchanged until incompatibility developed.’

  ‘What happened to these isolated pockets then?’

  ‘Well I imagine that as new populations moved in, the older ones were assimilated into the general gene pool, or they were slowly exterminated, as probably happened in North Borneo, when a very small and long isolated population was confronted with new comers equipped with a greatly superior technology. Perhaps some were integrated, who knows?’

  ‘Do you think that there was cross-breeding between the different populations?’

  ‘Maybe, I don’t know, it would require a long genetic research to find variations. That may have changed today, the information from the DNA we have extracted could change everything.’

  ‘But do you think they could interbreed?’

  ‘As I said, long isolated populations probably developed a degree of difference that made that difficult, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t know. What we do know is that in other species of large mammals there is crossbreeding in closely related members of the same species, even if the offspring is not always fertile. For example between horses and donkies, and between lions and tigers. Why should it be different between very closely related varieties of man?’

  ‘So they interbreed or were wiped out by superior beings.’

  ‘In brief, yes.’

  ‘What about Sangarin man?’ asked the attaché, trying to impress with his knowledge.

  ‘The same thing applies. He interbred with contiguous populations, who had interbred with other such populations on the fringe of their territory and so forth. It sounds simplistic but there you are.’

  ‘This all took place over an unimaginably long period of time. When you think we don’t even know with any precision what happened just a few hundred years ago, think of the Dark Ages in Europe, or the little we know of daily life at the time of the Romans, remember we discovered Pompeii by pure chance. Those early people migrated slowly; they did not have boats or horses. They moved by foot, a few kilometres each generation. After a couple of hundred generations or so - not much you may say but in time that represents more than all civilised history, think about that for a moment - they had travelled thousands of kilometres. All that would have been over uninhabited virgin territory, otherwise they would have been opposed by existing populations. By populations I mean groups living in regions where food was plentiful enough to support family groups.’

  ‘Do you think they protected their territories?’

  ‘There is no evidence from the distant past. But as I have explained man is a territorial animal and we do know from our history of the last six or seven thousand years, there is overwhelming evidence that as such, he is in the habit of rejecting strangers. Even in modern times, the confrontation of existing populations with new arrivals has always resulted in a considerable bloodshed.’

  ‘Yes I see what you mean, even in the Neolithic societies of Irian Jaya there is clear evidence of warfare and territoriality,’ said de Pazowski standing up to indicate that the meeting was over. ‘We will do everything necessary to assist the expedition with its work, do however keep us informed as your security is my responsibility.’