The Lost Forest

by John Francis Kinsella

  Chapter 32

  ARCHAIC ANCESTORS

  Pierre Ros liked to introduce borneensis to the camp’s new arrivals by describing him as a not very good looking individual by modern standards. He would have been of a similar build to modern men though perhaps a little more solid. What colour he was not known though in a tropical region the chances are that he was brown, with long hair and certainly unwashed as an orang-utan living in his forest habitat.

  From the skull it could be seen that his forehead was low with large protrusions over his eyes and a jaw line that was thick and powerful. He lived in the vast forests of Borneo like the present day Punans spending a large part of his time gathering food such as roots, fruit, bird eggs, and from the evidence of tools, and the bones found in his shelters, it could be deducted that he hunted animals wild pig, monkeys and birds. The remains of charcoal show that he possessed fire, perhaps only in more recent times and as a result of his contact and observations with his contempories…Homo sapiens. Excavations at the Great Niah Caves proved that his contempories certainly used fire.

  What kind of family life did he have? Like modern hunters gatherers he had his favourite camp sites, under cliffs, in cave mouths or on river banks, shelters that offered protection to one or more sides. The forests of Borneo were full of dangerous animals until relatively recent times, large animals, including tigers and rhinoceros. Man had always been a gregarious animal living in small family groups consisting of women and children with close relatives, brothers, sisters and perhaps one or two relatively older persons.

  No doubt borneensis communicated with some kind of elementary but effective language that was to eventually evolve into modern language. His entire knowledge was in his head and transmitted to each generation by example and word of mouth. In equatorial Borneo there are almost no seasons as are recognised in temperate zones and trees produce fruit according to different cycles that erectus would have recognised in his daily search for food.

  The arrival of more advanced humans did not take place like some kind of dramatic invasion, these men came one by one, in small groups, slowly, over very long periods of time, hundreds and thousands of years. They cohabited at a distance with erectus, who retreated deeper into the forest whenever menaced by better armed men, more able to communicate.

  Life on Borneo had continued undisturbed for hundreds of thousands of years and erectus was perfectly adapted to his environment, the proof was that he survived so long. The greatest dangers were from other groups who could have contested his territory or tried to steal his women.

  Borneensis did not know the harsh climatic changes of his contempories to the north, in China or in Europe. Borneo was a paradise on earth as it still is in many regions.

  ‘A Garden of Eden?’ said Ennis

  ‘If you like!’ Pierre replied pleased at the idea.

  Homo habilis and erectus, began leaving Africa sometime around two million years ago, spreading across the Eurasian landmass reaching Java, the most distant site from Africa, where one of the earliest non-African erectus remains were found.

  Fossil material from Ngandong, which has been dated to anywhere between 25,000 to 50,000 years old, suggests that erectus had evolved in isolation, developing features not shared by modern humans.

  The Borneo populations of erectus had also become progressively more isolated from other populations of erectus in the region, few scientists considered it possible that modern humans were descendants of Asian Homo erectus. The idea was abandoned by most western scientific thinkers who considered that Asian erectus was an evolutionary dead end, rather than the immediate ancestor to modern humans.

  ‘Whether modern humans could be direct descendants of Homo erectus, is considered a possibility by the Chinese, though Western scientists reject this idea,’ said Tegu ‘The dating is certain, the borneensis material clearly indicates that sapiens and erectus overlapped in time. Erectus can’t stay the same and be an ancestor at the same time,’ he said. ‘However it’s possible that there’s another branch of erectus, but for the moment we have no fossil evidence. The fossils found at Trinil and Sangiran were from about 1.8 million years old to maybe as young as 780,000 years old, and the fossils found at Ngandong have been dated to just 50,000 years old.’

  ‘The comparison between those fossils and the borneensis find remains to be seen and they may be two separate species or a sub-species,’ said Pierre

  ‘Would the differences in the skulls seen in Indonesia by due to normal variability in any population?’ asked Ennis.

  ‘A good point John, but if we examine modern human populations, we will see there are people with skulls that are short and round, and skulls that are long and narrow, these are normal variances within a given population,’ he said. ‘So I think it’s wrong to suggest that borneensis is not part of the Java family of early man, that is the latter part.’

  ‘Correct,’ said Tegu, ‘The fossils from 25,000 to 50,000 years old show less diversity between individuals than the earlier fossil material in Java.’

 

  Palaeoanthropology is one of the most controversial modern sciences followed by the general public as the world tried to substitute science for religion to explain man’s existence. The prima donnas of the scientific world, launched barely veiled insults at each other in the most unethical manner, pouring scorn on the learned papers of their colleagues and rubbishing their discoveries and theories in the press and on the television.

  Scientific journals were filled with the cacophony of scientists in their conflicting arguments. The general facts were relatively clear and the small but very comprehensive fossil record was very significant and for science straight forward. The species Homo erectus evolved slowly into Homo sapiens over hundreds of thousands of years becoming physically more gracile and developing skills in tool making, hunting and food gathering in parallel with the development of language and social structure. Modern humans considered themselves as the highly evolved fruit of a long evolution, but the reality is there were many dead ends and failures before archaic sapiens slowly acquired present day man’s characteristics.

  A controversy persists in paleoanthropological circles concerning the two competing theories on the evolution of erectus into sapiens, the ‘Multiregional Theory’ and the ‘Out of Africa Theory’. The latter advanced the idea that Homo sapiens evolved from a single group whose origin was in Africa, between one and two hundred thousand years ago. The oldest remains of anatomically modern humans were discovered in the Awash region of Ethiopia, dating from about 160,000 BP and according to certain geneticians were the forefathers of all of humanity issued from this population around 60,000 BP.

  The fact is however, at the very same time sapiens made his first timid appearance on the world scene, Homo erectus and his cousins populated the entire old world. At that time between one or two million individuals lived in Africa and on the Eurasian continent and the question scientists have posed is whether Homo sapiens had developed in isolation and then around one hundred thousand years ago burst forth from their isolated territory in the Horn of Africa, replacing all other forms of man as he spread out, or, did erectus evolve slowly into the different forms of men that people the planet today, in Africa, Europe and Asia, exchanging genes with other populations as they migrated to and fro in the never ending search for food and game, in the face of constant climatic change.

  It was a fact that many accepted scientific concepts of the past were transformed into the curiosities of scientific history, as new discoveries contradict well thought-out theories. The discovery of what is Homo erectus, or possibly habilis, at Dimansii in the Black Sea Republic of Georgia forced scientists to re-examine their ideas, just as they had done following discoveries of erectus at Atapuerca in Spain.

  The problem was that many palaeoanthropologists built their theories around scant incomplete skeletal remains of individuals who had lived at moments vastly far apart, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and even mi
llions of years. The same individuals lived in places separated by great distances; tens of thousands of kilometres apart, from Sterkfontaine in South Africa to Java, or Zhoukoudian in northern China. When situated in a three dimensional frame of space and time, the specimens, from which so many grand scientific theories were elaborated, showed only fragile links.

  In the case of the Solo people of Java, gracile archaic sapiens, dated by electron spin resonance, to between 50,000 and 27,000 years BP, were contempories of Homo sapiens who had arrived in the region, North Borneo, around 40,000 BP. The very fact that they were described as gracile by scientists demonstrated a pronounced evolution from the early forms of erectus. Did this evolution take place in isolation or was it the result of interbreeding with populations marked by constant migration?

  In spite of the coverage in the press given to the latest troubles with the Palestinians, there was little very sign of problems at the Tel-Aviv Sheraton. Pierre Ros saw no reason to waste their time hanging around the hotel and proposed that they join the Saturday evening crowd, young Israelis intent on enjoying themselves in the bars and restaurants of the beach area.

  They found a terrace bar overlooking the sea front, ordered two large beers and settled down to watch the joggers and other keep fit fiends at their work outs. Pierre filled Ennis in on the history of the Soreq Nuclear Research Centre near by to Tel-Aviv.

  They had arrived to conclude an agreement with Soreq to corroborate the dating results made in Paris and Jakarta. It was a scientific imperative to cross-check these, even though the CNRS in France was one hundred percent reliable, since work at Gadjah Mada University was at a virtual standstill. The University was plagued with huge difficulties from student demonstrations to communications and budget problems as a result of the disastrous economic and political situation in Jakarta.

  Pierre Ros’s organisation had collaborated over many years with the Soreq Nuclear Research Centre located near Yavne, west of Beersheba and twenty kilometres to the south east of Tel-Aviv. Soreq could be counted on to carry out highly reliable U-series dating, as they had developed excellent radio isotope techniques and their experience with Israel’s own human fossils discoveries was excellent.

  Soreq was a government laboratory specialised in nuclear research for both civil and military use. It was originally built by the Israeli government for the development of its nuclear research program and more to the point for the design and production of its bomb. The program for the construction of the first reactor had commenced in 1955. At the outset the prime purpose of Israel’s nuclear programme had been to develop a deterrent to protect them from their unhappy Arab neighbours.

  Once they had their bomb, and the means to deliver it to Tehran or Baghdad, their research diversified into other futuristic military fields, where non-chemical propellants were developed for curious applications such as anti-satellite guns, conceived for the Star Wars programme capable of firing solid projectiles into space at great velocities using plasma technology, such projectiles could destroy enemy spy satellites or be used in terrestrial combat to pierce any armour invented by man.

  With the end of the Cold War the menace had receded and Israel’s stock pile of nuclear weapons provided a sufficiently great overkill capacity to turn politician’s attentions to the great cost of their country’s research centres and to look more closely at the obscure programmes their scientists had invented. As a result Soreq’s program was extended to commercial space technology as well as industrial and commercial applications for their nuclear technology putting the centre’s expertise, scientific facilities and human resources to work for profit.

  Israel was doted with many brilliant scientists and many an upstanding Jewish mother saw nothing better than one of her sons becoming a respected scientist. The result was too many brains working on non-profitable research programmes. Scientists were notoriously unrealistic when it cames to economics, especially those used to weapons research with unlimited budgets and certain imagined they had discovered potential applications outside of the military field during the research to develop their bomb.

  Late that afternoon a message arrived from Jakarta announcing that the charcoal found in C4 had yielded a radiocarbon date of 2,600 ± 320 BP. That was close to C-14 dating of the calvarium made in Paris. Pierre Ros immediately gave priority to investigating the archaeology of the caves so as to establish a coherent stratigraphical and chronological relationship between the various deposits, as the samples of charcoal that had been dated were from positions strategraphically above the location of the jaw bone and isolated teeth.