The Lost Forest Read online

  Chapter 2

  OLD BONES

  There were better ways of spending Saturday morning than being dragged off for a talk about old bones. Kate had insisted that he accompany her to some lost southern Parisian suburb to listen to Michel Brunet, a renowned palaeoanthropologist, talk about his discovery of an important fossil in Chad that represented one of man’s early ancestors.

  It was wet and windy and spending the morning in bed with Kate would have certainly been more pleasant. Ennis, however, rationalised that at the worse that could be put back to Sunday, if he agreed to her expedition or not at all if he baulked at the suggestion.

  There was not too much traffic and they arrived early at the brand new and expensive looking médiathèque where the talk was to be held, it was just as well if they were to have a good seat since the receptionist did even mention the reservations that Kate had taken the precaution of making.

  The doors opened at ten and they made their way into the small conference hall. At the entrance to their relief they were told that those who had made reservations would find their seats marked by ‘Postits’ in the front rows. Michel Brunet sat alone on the low stage; behind him projected on a screen was the photo of a fairly battered looking skull.

  Brunet, after a brief introduction by a representative of the local municipal council, commenced his talk. He was a man of about sixty with an unassuming appearance, wearing a close cut greying beard, bespectacled, and sporting a worn blazer, he was not unlike an older version of an off duty explorer.

  It soon became evident that he was a passionate exponent of human evolution with a finely developed sense of humour and a fascinating talker. He started off by recalling to his audience that the teaching of evolution was still forbidden by law in the State of Alabama, then going on to explain that during the greatest part of human civilisation’s existence man had no past history; man was the result of divine creation, he was the centre of creation and at the centre of the universe.

  Brunet’s twenty year search for the common ancestor of man and the great apes had finally borne fruit in the harsh African Djurab Desert in Chad, five hundred kilometres north of the capital of Njamena, in the form of a seven million year old fossil baptised ‘Tuomai’.

  The climax of the talk was the presentation of a mould of Tuomai when the suburban audience of mostly not too young people pressed around the table to touch the resin copy.

  As they returned to Paris, Kate enthused about Brunet’s account of adventure and exploration in the vast expanses of the African desert, that he had provokingly described to his gawking audience trapped in their inescapable humdrum suburban existence. She was so excited by the idea that Ennis, in a weak moment and charmed by her girlish fervour, suggested she join him on his next trip to South East Asia in search of ancient ceramics and tribal art for his gallery.

  Kate, whose knowledge of South East Asia from a historical viewpoint and as a specialist in Asian art was considerable, had never visited Borneo and jumped at his invitation, accepting it before he had time to change his mind. Back in his apartment they spent the rest of the afternoon pouring over the maps and guides that Ennis dug out from his chaotically organised library.

  Looking at the map of Borneo she saw that to the north facing the South China Sea were the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak with the tiny Sultanate of Brunei squeezed in between them. To the south were the Indonesian provinces of Kalimantan that covered precisely 87% of the vast island. She read that the coastal areas were shallow, surrounded by impenetrable mangroves and without natural harbours, as a result the towns and villages were built well up stream on the banks of the many vast rivers. The highland areas were far inland and difficult to reach because of the dense forests, deep rivers and swamps. The first European to cross the island was the Dutch explorer Schwaner, in the mid-nineteenth century.

  At the end of the twentieth century all that was changing fast, hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest were burning. A cloud of smoke invaded the region almost asphyxiating the populations of Sumatra and Borneo. It was part of a recurring cycle of fires that regularly consumed the forests on the east coast of Sumatra and the south of Borneo that grew on a layer of turf up to fifteen metres thick. With the cyclical variations of climate that occurred with El Nino less rain fell and the turf dried out, that is relatively speaking, but enough to burn, sparked by the ancestral methods of shifting agriculture practiced by island’s villagers. They burnt down parcels of forest to make new fields for rice paddies at the end of August and the beginning of September, and in the years when the weather became too dry the fires got out of control taking hold of vast swaths of forest land.

  The explosive growth of Indonesia’s population brought the need of new agricultural land and an ever growing pressure on the primary forests that disappeared at the rate of two percent per year. In an arc from Pontianak to Bandjermasin fires raged covering the island with dense clouds of smoke that carried by the prevailing winds reached out to Jakarta on the island of Java to the south and Singapore to the north.

  In the most part of Borneo the soil was poor in the nutrients that were normally stored in the forest cover and recycled by natural debris, composed of dead leaves and plants forming the thin humus that covered the forest floor. Borneo lacked the rich soil formed as a result of the permanent volcanic activity that occurred on Java and Sumatra. The ground beneath the humus was a laterite formed by iron and aluminium hydroxide up to ten metres deep and once the thin top soil was removed little or no vegetation could prosper with the exception of wild grasses such as alang-alang.

  The annual rainfall was as much as three metres and in some coastal cities it rains up to one hundred and eighty days a year whilst in the mountainous regions it could be considerably more with an almost unvarying average ambient temperature of about 28°C. In mid-afternoon it hovered around 32°C, falling by between five and ten degrees just before dawn.

  The canopy was so dense that little light penetrated to the forest floor. The huge dominant trees literally stood on feet, huge buttresses splayed out on the forest floor, whilst the canopy was supported on the tree’s giant pillar like trunks and their branches, intermeshing with an endless variety of creepers to form a vast living tissue woven by the vitality of nature.

  Kate, like many anthropologists, could not help wondering about man’s colonisation of Borneo and how he had lived in the dense hostile forests that Ennis described to her. He was probably not unlike the present day Punans, a tribe hunter gatherers, though hunting by the inhabitants of the forest was always a game of luck, even nature’s most experienced predators depend on luck, their kill rate being about one in six for every animal tracked. Hunting was always a time consuming occupation and whilst hunters could starve herbivores, such as the orang-utan, could always find an abundance of fruits and plants though at the cost of spending most of their life in search of food and eating. The early men who inhabited the forests were omnivores; eating meat when the hunt was good, though most of the time being satisfied by a diet of fruit and vegetables, supplemented by small animals and insects. Unlike their contemporaries living on the African savannah, the possibility of scavenging was rare in Borneo, in the hot humid jungle dead animal were difficult to find, they either decomposed rapidly or were eaten by insects, birds and small animals that lived in great profusion in the dense vegetation.

  Scavenging would have been easier in Africa, in spite of competition from other large animals, where even today in the game reserves of the broad open African savannah, millions of large herbivores live, where zebras, gnu and antelopes graze. The life of these herbivores being about ten years meant that each year one to two hundred thousand animals were born and died, three thousand a day, providing a feast for efficient scavengers. In comparison the jungles of Borneo are dark and lonely with relatively few larger animals on the ground compared to the profusion of animal life in the canopy high above. Early man no doubt hunted wild pig, deer and smaller animals, as the Puna
ns tribes people do today. The buffalo and rhinoceros that also lived in the forest were certainly too dangerous to hunt.

  Ennis explained to Kate that little systematic scientific exploration had been started in Borneo until after World War II, and even then it had been very slow. Until that time most of Borneo had existed in its undisturbed prehistoric state for millions of years and only in very recent historical times had a small number of towns and villages been established on its coast and river banks.

  During the last ice ages between 18,000 and 40,000 years ago the temperature in Borneo fell by five to seven degrees with a much dryer climate, rainfall was much less than it is at present, water froze into the huge ice caps that invaded the northern hemisphere and sea levels fell by more than one hundred metres with a land bridge emerging joining Borneo to the Asian land mass.

  The climatic change brought modifications to the forests that covered a vast region that geologists know as Sundaland; the forests were probably less dense than today in many places. Early man arrived forced southwards by climatic pressure and slowly extended their habitat into Sundaland and what is today Borneo.

  The first Homo sapiens arrived across the landbridge from Asia around 40,000 ago with new tools and weapons followed thousands of years later by further waves of migrants who brought rudimentary agriculture with them and then boats and all the implements of Neolithic man.

  Ennis told Kate of the huge limestone caves at Niah between Bintulu and Miri not far from the coast of Sarawak where a skull was found by Tom Harrison in 1958, now dated by Carbon 14 techniques to around 40,000 years before present.