The Lost Forest Read online

  Chapter 10

  INDONESIA

  The islands of Indonesia have been inhabited by man and his ancestors for almost two million years according to the fossil evidence that has been found over the last century. When precisely man arrived is part of a long scientific discussion which will probably never be determined with any certitude.

  The islands of Sumatra, Java and Borneo lie on the Sunda shelf, which is around two hundred metres beneath the surface of the sea at its deepest point. As sea levels rose and fell over the last few million years climates changed and the whole or part of the Sunda shelf became dry land, allowing animals and later man to move from the South East Asian mainland onto the emerged land mass known to geologists as Sundaland.

  Man’s ancestor, Homo erectus, followed the same route to the region that is now Java, where they established their home under the shadows of the volcanic chain that runs along the southern edge of the present day archipelago. Dense jungles covered a fertile land enriched by the volcanic ash that was scattered by the frequent eruptions from the chain of fire.

  Erectus colonised river banks on the edge of the dense jungle, the river and its bank forming paths that allowed him to move freely over his territory and supplied his food: fruit and roots, fish and small animals as well as birds and insects. He was an omnivore, competing with the other large animals such as the orang-utan for fruit and nuts.

  When the sea level rose again and covered the coastal regions as the climate changed, men and animals were stranded on islands, where they continued to evolve in isolated communities, cut off from the other members of their species by the sea.

  Throughout this vast period of time the tropical forests of Indonesia remained remarkably stable in what is called ‘a climax equilibrium’, where plants and creature continued their never ending cycle of life and death in the forest.

  Over the last two million years, whenever the sea fell and land bridges emerged, new populations arrived including new men who competed with the existing inhabitants. These early human populations were however very small compared with those in recent historic times. Family groups of twenty to thirty persons lived in territories of not more than one hundred square kilometres leading the life of hunter gatherers, constantly on the move in search of food, not unlike the nomadic Punans of Borneo who still lead a nomadic life.

  At present the island of Java covers a surface of 125,000 square kilometres with a large part of the island uninhabitable due to the chain of high volcanic mountains that runs along its southern edge from east to west. In distant prehistoric times the total population of early men would not have been more than a mere 25,000 whilst Borneo, without volcanic activity and its 740,000 square kilometres, could have been the home to proportionally more.

  In a more recent time in history it is thought that Marco Polo may have been the first European to set foot in Indonesia. He is believed to have visited North Sumatra and Java in 1292, which at that time were part of a Hindu kingdom ruled by a powerful Raja. However, many of the islands of Indonesia including Borneo were surrounded by belts of dense and impenetrable mangrove swamps and wet forests reaching inland from the sea, fifty, one hundred or more kilometres inland. Apart from towns and settlements on the mouths of some of the larger rivers that drained the interior, the heart of the island was inaccessible.

  As a consequence, with the exception of Java and parts of Sumatra, which offered more accessible coast lines, much of the Raja’s kingdom consisted of coastal towns. Nevertheless the Hindu kingdom’s rulers managed to establish control in the region of Kutai, on the Eastern part of Borneo, a region that had been visited for centuries by Chinese and Persian traders.

  After Marco Polo the Portuguese and Spanish arrived, followed by the British and Dutch. The Dutch established the Dutch East India Company in Indonesia in 1662 and later proclaimed their sovereignty with Indonesia becoming a colonial possession of the Dutch crown.

  At the end of the eighteenth century the population of Java had reached three-and-a-half million, today, just two hundred years later, it has reached more than two hundred and twenty million, over sixty times more. If we were compared it to prehistoric times the population has been multiplied by more than one thousand.

  As to Borneo the story has been very different with a present day population of around six million, that is twelve persons per square kilometre, in prehistoric times the population was as thinly spread as the orang-utans of today, vast regions of the interior were totally unknown to man until very recent times, never explored. The jungle covered mountains forming a crescent of over one thousand kilometres long, the easterly most point of which commences in the north with the 4,101 metres high Mount Kinabulu, Gunung Longnawan, 2,988 metres high lying in the centre and at the westerly extremity is the 1,701 metres high Mount Niyut. This chain of mountains forms a natural barrier separating the eastern states of the Malaysian Federation, Sarawak and Sabah from the Indonesian Provinces of Kalimantan.

  The mountains are drained on the southern watershed by the powerful River Mahakam and River Kapuas, whose sources remained unexplored by outsiders until the twentieth century. They were only known to those who inhabited the distant interior, small isolated tribes that dwelt on the river banks of the dark forests.

  The dense primary forests were also inhabited by wild animals, orang-utans, tigers, wild buffalo and elephants. In these conditions it was just possible that primitive human beings such as Homo erectus could have survived until recent times. They and their like had survived their wanderings over hundreds of thousands of years, crossing mountains, deserts and continents to arrive in Sundaland, where they lived in the jungle with all its dangers for over one and a half million years. When the land bridge that had joined Borneo to the continent disappeared under the rising the sea they were separated from the road that had led them out of Africa and all contact with the waves of more evolved men, that is until the seas withdrew once again, and Homo sapiens arrived. Many more millennium followed before others arrived bringing with them the invention of boats and open sea navigation.

  Homo erectus lived in isolation; his only very distant biological relatives present were the orang-utans, until the arrival of Homo sapiens who drove him deep into the forest perhaps even hunting their cousins and eating them, forcing them to retreat to relative safety, deeper and deeper into the mountains.