Mcdonald Institute of Archaeological Research

CN Chapter 8

CT Missing Links, Cultural Modernity and the Dead: Anatomically Modern Humans in the Great Cave of Niah (Sarawak, Borneo)

Chris Hunt

Graeme Barker

McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research

Cambridge University

A-Head abstract

The Great Cave of Niah in Sarawak (northern Borneo) came into the gaze of Western Science through the work of Alfred Russell Wallace, who came to Sarawak in the 1850s to search for ‘missing links’ in his pioneering studies of evolution and the natural history of Island Southeast Asia and Australasia. The work of Tom and Barbara Harrisson in the 1950s and 1960s placed the Great Cave, and particularly their key find, the ‘Deep Skull’, at the nexus of the evolving archaeological framework for the region: for decades the skull, dated in 1958 by adjacent charcoal to c.40,000 BP, was the oldest fossil of an anatomically modern human anywhere in the world and thus critical to ideas about human evolution and dispersal. Although several authorities later questioned the provenance and antiquity of the Deep Skull, renewed investigations of the Harrisson excavations since 2000 have shown that it can be attributed securely to a specific location in the Pleistocene stratigraphy, with direct U-series dating on a piece of the skull indicating an age for it of c.37,500 BP and the first evidence for associated human activity at the site going back to c.50,000 BP. The new work also indicates that the skull is part of a cultural deposit, perhaps a precursor to the long tradition in Borneo of processing of the dead and secondary burial. These indicators of cultural complexity chime with the complexity of the subsistence behaviourof the early users of the caves discussed by Philip Piper and Ryan Rabett in chapter ten [CORRECT?] of this volume.

A-Head Introduction

During the course of his expedition to Borneoin 1855to make collections of “shells, insects, birds, and the orang-utan” (Wallace 1913, 27), the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace was informed about enormous caverns at Niah and Mulu (Fig. 1). Though he was unable to visit them, he was convinced that such caves were likely to be the best locations to search for the ‘missing link’ between humans and apes (T. Harrisson 1958; Sherratt 2002).In 1864 he wrote to Charles Darwin with the information that the new British Consul going out to Sarawak had informed him that he intended to explore caves near the capital Kuching “and if anything of interest is obtained, a good large sum can no doubt be raised for a thorough exploration of the whole country” (T. Harrisson 1958, 551). In the event, it was A. Hart Everett, an amateur naturalist and collector who came out to work for the Sarawak government in 1869, who led the first scientific expedition to Sarawak caves in search of the ‘missing link’, backed by a committee formed of leading members of Victorian science in the UK: the geologist Charles Lyell, the archaeologist William Pengelly, and the anthropologist George Busk. In 1873 he visited the Bau Caves near Kuching and the Niah Caves, publishing an anonymous account of his visit to Niah’s main cavern, the Great Cave, in the Sarawak Gazette in the same year. He described how, after a difficult walk through the swamp forest, he arrived at the spectacular West Mouth of the Great Cave: “we found ourselves standing at the mouth of a large arched cavern, several hundred feet broad, and over two hundred feet high, huge stalactites were pending from the ceiling, and a fringe of vegetation dropping from its outer edge.” (Anon. 1873, 60; Fig. 2).

Everett collected some of the human remains lying on the surface of the West Mouth and other entrances to the Great Cave and took them back to London. Although George Busk ascertained that they were likely to be recent in age and “the information they afford is very meagre” (Busk 1879-80, 321), they raised sufficient interest for the British Association for the Advancement of Science to pass a resolution at its Dublin meeting in 1878 “that Mr John Evans, Sir John Lubbock, Major-General Lane Fox (General Pitt-Rivers), Mr George Busk, Professor Boyd Dawkins, Mr Pengelly, and Mr A. W. Franks be a Committee for the purpose of exploring Caves in Borneo; that Mr Evans be the Secretary; and that the sum of £50 be placed at their disposal for the purpose”. Further sums were raised, including from Charles Darwin, to meet the estimated costs of the expedition of £370, and Everett was dispatched to the Niah Caves again. He faced local opposition to his plans for excavation because of the disturbance to known burial grounds, and after undertaking a small amount of bone collection he concluded that the caves “were too recently raised above the waters of the sea to render it probable that future discoveries will be made” and “no further expense should be hazarded”. In a bizarre twist of fate, his Niah Caves collections, donated to what is now the Natural History Museum in London, almost certainly provided the orang-utan mandible and human skull that formed the Piltdown Man, the spectacular ‘missing link’ fossil reported in 1912 but demonstrated in the 1950s to be a crude forgery (Oakley & de Vries 1959).

A-Head The discovery of the ‘Deep Skull’

The famous swiftlet and bat populations of the caves, rather than their potential archaeological significance, first attracted Tom Harrisson, a passionate ornithologist, to visit the caves in 1947 (Harrisson 1958, 564-565). Born in 1911 and after being expelled from Cambridge University for disorderly conduct, he took part in a series of expeditions to remote places (including to Sarawak) and then in the Mass Observation project in Britain (Harrisson 1937; 1943; 1961; Heimann 1997). During World War II he trained as a commando and parachuted into the interior mountains of Sarawak in March 1945 to organise resistance against the Japanese occupying forces (Harrisson 1959), earning a DSO for the success of this mission. In 1947 he was appointed Curator of Sarawak Museum and Government Ethnologist, a position he held until his retirement in 1967. Alongside an abiding interest in the anthropology of the Sarawak peoples, and animal conservation, he embarked on a major programme of archaeological excavation given the complete absence of such work since Everett’s expeditions. Having no training he enlisted the help of Michael Tweedie, Curator of Singapore Museum, and after initial work in the Bau Caves and elsewhere near Kuching they started work in the West Mouth of the Niah Great Cave in 1954, with an initial two week season.

They excavated a large trench with considerable rapidity - and with a lack of control or recording that has meant that unfortunately little of this work can now be reconstructed. They dug through a succession of burials which we can now recognise as likely to have been Metal Age and Neolithic, finding underneath them deep deposits rich in evidence of early human occupation: charcoal, ash, animal bone fragments, and occasional primitive stone tools. Though Harrisson described the results as “incredible – just been digging there, fantastic”, he realised that it was “at once evident that to tackle this cave properly, we were going to need personnel by the score, financial resources by the tens of thousands, and a long-term programme of continuing work both in the field and with excavated material back in the Museum” (Heimann 1997, 291). In 1957 he returned to Niah with his newly-wed wife Barbara, beginning a ten-year campaign of major excavations of several months’ duration each season, most of which Barbara supervised for the duration of the work with Tom dividing his time between Niah and Sarawak Museum in Kuching. By the end they had conducted extensive excavations in most of the entrances to the Great Cave, and in many other small caves around the Niah limestone massif, but the most extensive excavations, and the most spectacular discoveries, were in the West Mouth.

The 1957 season concentrated on the West Mouth. A large trench was excavated around the 1954 pit, dug in horizontal ‘spits’ measured in relation to the original ground surface (Fig. 3). At the base of the trench the Harrissons excavated a deep sounding which they termed Hell because of the difficult working conditions under the full afternoon sun. A quantity of charcoal collected at depth in this trench (106 inches, or 260 cm, below the 1954 ground surface) and sent to the University of Groningen in the Netherlands for the new method of radiocarbon dating yielded a date of around 40,000 years ago, the maximum age range of the method at that time. On 7 February 1958, early in the 1958 season, Barbara’s team started to uncover fragments of human skull at the same depth as the 1957 charcoal sample (Fig. 4). Tom Harrisson was in Kuching to receive a visit from one of the world’s experts on human origins, Professor von Koenigswald. Summoned by telegram by Barbara, he and von Koenigswald travelled to Niah (by helicopter, courtesy of Shell) to witness the full excavation of the find. The skull, referred to subsequently as the Deep Skull, was studied by Don Brothwell at the British Museum and identified as that of teenage girl or young adult female, anatomically modern, of Australoid type (Brothwell 1960; Fig. 5). Although Barbara Harrisson remembers von Koenisgwald, who was hoping for a primitive fossil, dismissing the Deep Skull as “not interesting” as its physical features became apparent during excavation, its discovery brought the Great Cave to international attention because, if it was of the same antiquity as the 1957 charcoal sample, it was the earliest modern human fossil known that that time anywhere in the world. Human remains found near the Deep Skull, at the same depth, included an almost complete left femur and a right proximal tibia fragment (Krigbaum & Datan 1999; 2005) and a human talus (Hooijer 1963).

The Harrissons also found prolific evidence for human occupation at similar depths to the Deep Skull extending several metres to the north of the Hell Trench into a small rock overhang or shelter formed at the northern cave wall. They obtained a series of radiocarbon dates indicating that this part of the West Mouth, which they termed the ‘habitation’ or ‘frequentation’ zone, had been regularly occupied through the Late Pleistocene and into the Holocene. Further into the cave entrance they found a dense collection of some 200 graves (representing about 400 bodies) dating to the Neolithic and Metal Age, c.4,000-2,000 years ago. The Harrissons and their collaborators published numerous papers on their discoveries, especially in the Sarawak Museum Journal, but never a final report with detailed stratigraphic or contextual documentation, so doubts about the reliability of the Pleistocene finds, especially the status of the Deep Skull, were raised regularly by scholars attempting to incorporate the Niah finds into studies of the region’s prehistory (e.g. Bellwood 1997; Bulbeck 1982; Kennedy 1979; Solheim 1983; Storm 2001; Wolpoff 1999). Were the radiocarbon dates, at an early stage in the development of the method, reliable? A key component of the Harrisson dating was extrapolation by depth, anchored by the radiocarbon dates, and the most common sediment excavated in the West Mouth, described by Harrisson as the ‘pink and white layer’, was interpreted by him as formed by a constant drizzle of pink ‘cave earth’ from the cave roof mixed with fragments of white limestone lumps. Age-depth extrapolation of this kind, however, ran counter to the experience of most cave excavators dealing with complex cave sediments. Indeed, had the excavators unknowingly mixed material of different ages because of their spit method of excavation? Was the Deep Skull in fact from a Neolithic or Metal Age burial?

Small-scale excavations were undertaken in 1976 by the Malaysian archaeologist Zuraina Majid, for her Yale University PhD, to try to resolve such doubts, but although she secured new radiocarbon dates from the Hell Trench and other soundings in the West Mouth and demonstrated the validity of the broad sequence of Late Pleistocene and Holocene occupation and burial reported by the Harrissons (and added important new data to it), she was unable to resolve the underlying stratigraphic questions about the Harrisson discoveries (Zuraina Majid 1982). This was the context of the resumption of fieldwork at the site in 2000 by the Niah Caves Project (NCP), with the objectives of clarifying the nature and chronology of the stratigraphic sequences in the major cave entrances, and of associated human activity; locating these sequences in regional climatic and environmental frameworks; and using the new information to inform the re-study of the substantial archive of records and finds held in the Harrisson Excavation Archive at Sarawak Museum (Barker 2005; in press; Barker et al. 2002; 2007).

A-Head The West Mouth sedimentary sequence, and the location of the Deep Skull

The Niah Caves Project has established that the sedimentary deposits of the West Mouth are heterogeneous and have a variety of origins, including deposition by airfall, running water, mudflow and slope processes. Gilbertson et al. (2005) identified four archaeologically-significant lithofacies in the area adjacent to the findspot of the ‘Deep Skull’ in the Hell Trench (Fig. 6; Table 1). The age relationships of these sedimentary bodies have been resolved by AMS dating of charcoal fragments contained within them, the reliability of these dates significantly improved by the use of the ABOX pre-treatment technique (Higham et al. 2009).The sediments were laid down in a basin formed between the cave entrance lip, the north wall of the cave, and the toe of the guano mound filling the interior of the West Mouth. The basin lies partly under and in front of the rock overhang, extending to where the Hell Trench was located. Any water flowing down the guano mound drained into this basin and flowed northwards along it down a rock channel parallel to the cave lip, into the overhang, where it drained away through a sink-hole (inferred, not excavated).

Between c.50,000 cal. BP and 38,000 cal. BP Lithofacies 2 and 2C accumulated in the basin, the former from the exterior (western) side of the cave entrance and the latter from the interior, intermingling in the channel. Lithofacies 2C consisted of a colluvium formed of collapsed speleothem and other debris from the cave lip. It supported the development of temporary surfaces that were sufficiently stable to be burrowed into by insects such as robber wasps (Sphex diabolicus) and vertebrates, and on which people deposited cultural debris including the residues of fires, meals, and butchery activities. In the process of slipping down from the cave lip, Lithofacies 2C became interbedded with Lithofacies 2, complex red-brown silts and sands up to 2.5 m thick formed by the episodic occurrence of streams, ponds, mass movement and soil formation, separated by periods of desiccation. At least thirteen episodes of fluvial erosion have been recognised within Lithofacies 2 from geochemistry, granulometry and micromorphology, some of which reworked desiccated and cracked muds on the floor of the existing channel (Gilbertson et al. in press). The duration and intensity of these alternating wetting and drying episodes are not known, but the major oscillations that can be detected in the sedimentology and palynology can be broadly correlated with the isotope climate signals in the NGRIP ice core in Greenland (Hunt et al. 2012; Fig. 7). Cultural debris also accumulated on the Lithofacies 2 surfaces. Lithofacies 2C has continued to accumulate on the exterior side of the basin to the present day, but between c.38,000 cal. BP and c.35,000 cal. BP a major hydro-collapse in the interior guano mound caused a massive mudflow of wet guano up to 3 m thick to flow downslope into the basin, where it struck, flowed into, and mostly covered Lithofacies 2 and 2C (Figs 6 and 7). This more or less instantaneous mudflow, probably forming in hours or days, categorized as Lithofacies 3, is Harrisson’s ‘pink and white layer’ that he assumed had accumulated over many thousands of years as a drizzle of roof fall. Capping it in places was a related sediment derived from Lithofacies 3 by weathering, Lithofacies 3R.

Lithofacies 4, which formed on top of Lithofacies 3 and 3R between c.35,000 cal. BP and c.8000 cal. BP, consisted of brown fine-grained silt-rich sediments with plentiful evidence of human activity, the ‘frequentation deposits’ described by Harrisson as being extremely rich in ash, charcoal, butchered animal bone, stone tools etc. Most of this lithofacies was removed by the excavators, but mapping the vestiges that remain as plinths of sediment under the rock overhang and as a few standing walls, and correlating these with photographs in the Harrisson Excavation Archive, indicated that it extended over some 150 m2 from the back of the rock overhang across the basin at the front of the West Mouth and was up to 4 m thick in the centre of its distribution. Human activities during the accumulation of Lithofacies 4 included dumping large quantities of ash and digging pits into the underlying sediments probably for storing and in the process leaching out toxins from the nuts and tubers that were being collected for food (Barker et al. 2007; and see Piper and Rabett this volume). According to the radiocarbon dates of charcoal in these pits, these activities dated back to 33,790 ±330 bp or 37,341-39,550 cal. BP (OxA-11302) and 29,070 ±220 bp or 33,121-34,518 cal. BP (OxA-11303). The archive photographs show that such pits extended right across the Lithofacies 4 zone. The geochemistry and palynology of the Late Pleistocene sediments of Lithofacies 4 indicate that they developed in a climatic regime that was slightly cooler and drier than today, interspersed with wetter episodes, a sequence that again can be broadly equated with the NGRIP isotope curve (Hunt et al. 2012; Fig. 7).