Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 118
Scaffolds used by poachers of birds' nests dot the immense Niah Caves of
Sarawak. These caves and the nearby areas have been inhabited by modern humans for at
least 40,000 years.
Encounters along the way
As we saw, the modern human migrants must have encountered Neander-
thals in the Middle East, but traces of those encounters have been lost. Later,
when their descendants on the Great Migration arrived in the Greater Sunda
Islands, they encountered some even more distant relatives.
The fi rst of those relatives to arrive on the Greater Sunda island chain were
(we think)
Homo erectus
. Bands of
H. erectus
, our highly peripatetic and mod-
estly brainy ancestors, left Africa about 1.8 million years ago. During the early
part of their own extensive migration they appear to have followed migra-
tion routes far to the north of the later modern human Great Migration. They
left fossil traces behind in Georgia, north of Anatolia. But once they reached
