Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tradition of female genital mutilation (“circumcision”) persists on the island.
This repellent ritual appears to predate the Muslim conversion. On nearby
Christian Flores female circumcision is no longer permitted.
Today's cultural dif erences cause dramatic disconnects from one island
to the next, but this cultural diversity is a pale refl ection of the dif erences
that separated the islands' hominan populations in the distant past. As we
saw in the previous chapter those past diversities were generated, not by the
invasion of dif erent religions, but by the migratory movements of homin-
ans and later of modern humans along the length of the island chain.
Modern humans arrived on the Sunda Shelf more than 40,000 years
ago. Their arrival was followed by the disappearance of the
H. erectus
tribes
that had lived there for a million and a half years. There are striking paral-
lels between these events and the arrival in Europe of the Cro-Magnons and
other modern groups, which took place at around the same time. The Cro-
Magnon arrival in Europe was followed, somewhere between 2,000 and
10,000 years later, by the disappearance of the Neanderthals. It seems that
a similar sequence of events may have occurred in Southeast Asia. Did the
invading groups of modern humans drive the last
H. erectus
to extinction? If
so, then everywhere they went modern humans seem to have been extremely
ef ective, and merciless, competitors!
The clever little Hobbits
The complex prehistory of humans and other hominans in Southeast Asia
has been made even more fascinating by the discovery of the Hobbits on the
island of Flores.
The fi rst hint that any sort of hominan had penetrated to this remote island
came in 1970, with the publication of a report of stone tools at a site called Mata
Menge in central Flores. The site, part of the Soa volcanic basin, is an open area
Figure 130
(
opposite
) This Komodo dragon,
Varanus komodoensis
, stalks out onto the
dock at the island of Rinca, sending the boat crews scurrying. The fi rst hominans to arrive
on Flores found even larger relatives of today's Komodo dragons awaiting them. They were
nonetheless able to exploit these terrifying and poisonous animals for food.
