Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Almost certainly yes. The oldest incontrovertible traces of modern
humans on Java, in a cave called Song Gupuh in the eastern part of the island,
from other nearby islands that modern humans arrived in the region at least
40,000, and perhaps as much as 60,000, years ago. Thus they could easily
have overlapped with the last of the
H. erectus
.
The world that modern humans found as they ventured into Sundaland
must have been strange and dif erent from anything that they had encoun-
tered earlier. I got a faint idea of the conditions that they must have encoun-
tered when I visited the vast series of caves in Niah National Park. This rain-
forest park is an ornament of the Malaysian province of Sarawak on Borneo.
I went there with my colleague Sylvester Tan, a Bornean forest ecologist
whom you met in Chapter 5.
The heavily forested Niah Mountains seem solid enough, but in fact they
are honeycombed with gigantic caverns. The caves are some of the largest
in the world, immense hollows that have been eroded out of the soft lime-
stone of the park's mountains by millennia of rainwater. Here and there the
remaining thin limestone shell that separates the caves from the outside
world has collapsed, admitting shafts of green light into the immense spaces
within the mountains.
These caves, as large as aircraft hangars, have a sadly deserted feel. Once
they were the home of colonies of millions of swifts that built their nests
of twigs and spittle on the caves' roofs. The colonies have been decimated
to feed China's insatiable appetite for birds' nest soup. When I scanned the
caves' roofs I saw very few nests.
Graeme Barker of the University of Leicester and his colleagues have
shown that the caves and the area around them were fi rst inhabited by mod-
human skull dating from that time.
The fi rst modern humans who arrived at the caves must have found them
fi lled with swifts and bats. Indeed, a few days earlier I had watched at sunset
as immense swarms of bats burst out of the nearby Mulu caves. These caves,
almost as large and extensive as the Niah caves, are in Sarawak's forested
