Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
interior near the wild and beautiful Mulu River. They have not been as dam-
aged by poachers because they are more remote.
The bat populations of the Mulu caves have also undergone steep recent
declines in numbers, but they are still impressive and provide some indica-
tion of the abundance that must have greeted the fi rst modern humans in
the area. Seemingly limitless food sources must have encouraged these early
migrants to settle. Then, overtaken by restlessness or more likely forced
to move on after they had overexploited the easiest supplies of food, some
of these people traveled further south through Borneo's thick jungles and
across the land bridge that then joined Borneo to Java. During this migration
they must have encountered ancient tribes of
H. erectus
. Did they fi ght with
them? So far the fossil record is silent on any interactions.
At the end of the migration
The genetic evidence is strong that modern humans did migrate over the
space of a few millennia across the enormous distance from northeastern
Africa all the way to Australia. How could they, with their Stone Age tech-
nology, move so far so quickly? Some answers can be found by examining
what we know about the history of the peoples with the clearest cultural
connection to the original migrants, the Australian Aborigines.
The Aboriginal tribal land of Arnhem Land in Australia's Northern Ter-
ritory has close associations with the fi rst migrants who came over the land
bridge from the north. On a 2001 visit, before the full details of the Great
Migration had become evident to genetic anthropologists, I had the chance
to penetrate this remote area.
The tribal reserve covers a vast region from Kakadu National Park all
the way east to Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Australian tribal
lands have had an agonizing history, beginning with the fi rst violent clashes
over territory in 1788 between the Aboriginals and the Europeans who had
begun to spread out from the convict settlement at Botany Bay. The clashes
continued over more than two centuries, marked by continuous confl ict
