Charlie Sheldon's Blog, page 24

Ancient Seafarers

Special Report: Ancient Seafarers
Volume 50 Number 2, March/April 1997


by Peter Bellwood







Map of Southeast Asia and Australia, with present and Ice Age land-sea boundaries, shows the importance of seafaring in this region. Possible routes for the colonization of Australia by modern humans are north, through Sulawesi, and south, crossing from Timor. By 1000 B.C. obsidian from New Britain was reaching Borneo. Indo-Roman pottery reached Bali by the early centuries A.D. (Lynda D’Amico) [LARGER IMAGE]

Southeast Asia and Australia give archaeologists some of the best evidence for ancient sea crossings, not just by Palaeolithic humans but also by Neolithic peoples and even spice traders contemporary with the Roman Empire. New discoveries, some controversial, are pushing back the dates of human colonization of this region and are expanding our knowledge of early island networks. These finds are also illuminating the first steps in some of the longest prehistoric open-sea voyages of colonization on record–from Southeast Asia to Polynesian islands such as Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand, and perhaps also from Indonesia to Madagascar–during the first millennium A.D.

To understand the implications of these discoveries, one must be aware that the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago contains two very different biogeographical regions. The western islands on the Sunda Shelf–Sumatra, Java, Bali, and Borneo–were joined to each other and to the Asian mainland by landbridges during glacial periods of low sea level. Hence they supported rich Asian placental mammal faunas and were colonized by Homo erectus, perhaps as early as 1.8 million years ago. The eastern islands–Sulawesi, Lombok, Flores, Timor, the Moluccas, and the Philippines–have never been linked by landbridges to either the Sunda Shelf or Australia, or to each other. They had limited mammal faunas, chance arrivals from Asia and Australasia.

Migration through the archipelago has always required that humans cross substantial stretches of open sea. But when did they first attempt to do this? There is a current controversial claim by a joint Dutch-Indonesian team that humans were contemporaries of stegodons, extinct elephant-like animals, at a site called Mata Menge on the Indonesian island of Flores. Stone flakes and stegodon bones have been found here in presumed association in deposits located just above a reversal of the earth’s magnetic field dating to 730,000 years ago. Should this claim receive future support we will have to allow for the possibility that even Homo erectus was able to cross open sea, in this case the 15-mile-wide Strait of Lombok between Bali and Lombok.

That the Australian continent was first settled at least 30,000 years ago, by people who had to cross consecutive sea lanes in eastern Indonesia, was well known by the late 1960s. Research by the late Joseph Birdsell and by Geoffrey Irwin of Auckland University suggests that there were separate northern and southern routes, along which most islands would have been visible from their closest neighbors on clear days, leading from the Sunda Shelf islands towards Australia and New Guinea. If Australia was first reached from Timor, as seems likely, then a final sea crossing of about 55 miles, involving movement out of sight of land, would also have been required.

The Australian archaeological record has now been pushed back to the limits of conventional radiocarbon dating, with several sites clocking in between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago. Radiocarbon dates of this age are potentially subject to contamination by younger carbon at levels undetectable in the laboratory. Such contamination can produce a date younger than 40,000 years when the real age is much older. In recent years, optical luminescence dating of sites in northern Australia has raised the possibility that humans arrived there as long as 60,000 years ago, and many archaeologists now accept these new dates. More controversial are current reports, widely publicized in the world media and published in the journal Antiquity, that Jinmium, a sandstone rock-shelter in Australia’s Northern Territory, has stone artifacts more than 100,000 years old. The site’s investigators–Richard Fullagar of the Australian Museum in Sydney and Lesley Head and David Price of the School of Geosciences at the University of Wollongong–used thermoluminescence dating to determine the age of its lower levels. The lowermost stone artifacts are claimed to be more than 116,000 years old. Because the Jinmium dates are from thermoluminescence rather than the more accurate single-grain optical luminescence, many archaeologists question this claim, and verification is essential. Conventional wisdom has always held that the first humans to reach Australia were modern Homo sapiens, but if the Jinmium dates are correct it could be that more archaic forms once lived in Australia, as they did throughout the rest of the tropical and temperate Old World. Indeed, on Java new dates from the Ngandong and Sambungmacan sites suggest that Homo erectus may have survived far longer than previously believed, perhaps to as recently as 25,000 years ago (see “Homo erectus Survival“).

Elsewhere in the Southeast Asian island region, new evidence for early voyaging comes from archaeological projects undertaken in the Moluccas, northern Borneo, and Bali. In the northern Moluccas, between Sulawesi and New Guinea, humans were visiting the coastal caves of Golo and Wetef on Gebe Island 33,000 radiocarbon years ago. Caves and open sites on coastal Sulawesi, northern coastal New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the northern Solomons (southeast of New Guinea) have already produced similar dates. At this time people seem to have been very mobile, leaving only sparse traces of occupation (mainly flaked stone tools and marine shells) and not engaging much in trade of raw materials, such as stone for making tools. Many of the islands at this time, especially in the Moluccas and island Melanesia (the Solomons, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia), may have had such limited land faunas that they were unable to support large permanent populations. Those who reached New Guinea and Australia, then joined by a landbridge, might have found a better living hunting now extinct species of large marsupials and flightless birds. Current research at the site of Cuddie Springs near Brewarrina in western New South Wales is demonstrating contemporaneity of humans and megafauna on the Australian continent about 30,000 years ago.

Between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago the Moluccan and island Melanesian archaeological records indicate greater contact and innovation. Obsidian from New Britain was carried to New Ireland (but not apparently as far as the Moluccas) possibly beginning 20,000 to 15,000 years ago. Marsupials were deliberately taken by humans from New Guinea and perhaps Halmahera to stock small islands, presumably for hunting purposes. Cuscuses (nocturnal catlike creatures) were taken to New Ireland, and by 10,000 years ago both cuscuses and wallabies appeared on Gebe. The people of Gebe also built small circular arrangements of coral blocks, too small to have functioned as hut foundations, on the floor of Golo Cave ca. 12,000 years ago. They may have served a ritual function. Several sites in the northern Moluccas, Talaud, and Admiralty Islands have a unique and rather impressive industry of adzes made from shells of large Tridacna and Hippopus clams at about the same date. These adzes suggest that manufacture of dugout canoes was technically possible by 13,000 years ago, although the earliest colonists of these islands probably paddled small rafts. Whatever their craft, the extent and repetitiveness of the earliest colonizations–to as far east as the Solomon Islands via many island-hops by 30,000 years ago–makes some degree of intentionality undeniable.

Many millennia later the Indo-Malaysian region again witnessed remarkable transfers of people and material culture. Three thousand years ago, Neolithic people exchanged New Britain obsidian across 2,400 miles to the site of Bukit Tengkorak in Sabah, northern Borneo. The Lapita people moved it for 2,100 miles eastward from New Britain to as far as Fiji. A new report in the journal Science claims that New Britain obsidian, excavated by archaeologist Stephen Chia of Universiti Sains Malaysia and analyzed by anthropologist Robert Tykot of the University of South Florida, reached Bukit Tengkorak much earlier, by 4000 B.C. No details of the dating are presented, however, and the claim remains unsubstantiated. During the original excavation of this site, by myself in 1987, we recovered a good series of radiocarbon dates and obsidian, identified by Roger Bird of the Australian Nuclear Sciences and Technology Organisation as coming from New Britain. At that time we concluded that the Bukit Tengkorak obsidian dated back no further than 1000 B.C. and was contemporary with the Lapita archaeological culture of the western Pacific (ca. 1500 to 300 B.C.).

As far as Lapita is concerned, my own view, and that of many other archaeologists including Patrick Kirch of the University of California at Berkeley, is that the Lapita culture represents the Austronesian-speaking Neolithic populations that colonized Oceania (Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia) beginning ca. 1500 B.C. These people were ancestral to modern Polynesians and eastern Micronesians, and also ancestral, to a lesser degree because of the prior existence of human populations in the western Pacific, to many of the populations of island Melanesia. In this view, Lapita represents a transmission of people, and Austronesian languages and cultures, into Oceania from Island Southeast Asia, and ultimately from southern China and Taiwan. It is significant that the New Britain obsidian trade, although occurring locally back into the Pleistocene in the Bismarck Archipelago, reached its long-distance apogee in Lapita times.

Opposition to this view of Lapita origins comes from John Terrell of the Field Museum of Natural History, who believes he has found evidence that many cultural features linked with Lapita may have evolved on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea and not in Southeast Asia. At sites near the town of Aitape he has found pottery, so far not precisely dated, which resembles Lapita but lacks its elaborate impressed designs. According to Terrell it also resembles pottery made in Indonesia at about the same time as Lapita, and perhaps even slightly before. Terrell believes that the Polynesian ancestors did not migrate directly from Southeast Asia but were living in northern New Guinea for a very long time before some people finally left Melanesia to colonize Polynesia. However, archaeologists such as myself, who have undertaken research in both Island Southeast Asia and Polynesia, may find this opinion difficult to accept and will certainly demand accurate dating of the new materials from Aitape before giving them serious attention.

We also have dramatic new evidence of sailing ability in the early historical period in Southeast Asia, in this case perhaps involving use of the monsoon winds that blow seasonally across the Bay of Bengal. About 2,000 years ago, pottery characteristic of the Indo-Roman site of Arikamedu in Tamil Nadu, on the Indian coast, found its way to the site of Sembiran in Bali (excavated by I.W. Ardika of Udayana University in Bali), an astounding 2,700 miles as the crow flies, or much more if the sailors hugged the coast. This Indian trade pottery–the largest assemblage ever found outside the Indian subcontinent itself–heralded a millennium of cultural contact that gave rise to the temples and civilizations of Pagan, Angkor, and Borobudur. Much of this trade probably involved spices–even Romans occasionally acquired cloves, which came from small islands in the northern Moluccas.

Future research, if some of the above claims are to attain the status of fact, must involve more thorough dating and more careful attention to the stratigraphic pitfalls that one can fall into, both in caves and open sites. Apparent associations between artifacts, datable materials, and geomorphological contexts can often be deceptive. Furthermore, all the coastal sites that might contain direct traces of Pleistocene colonization were inundated by a rise in the sea level of 325 feet or more after the last glacial maximum. All we see now is the inland geographical skeleton of the former landscape. Underwater archaeology might one day come to the rescue, but so far historical wrecks are proving more attractive, and lucrative, than sunken Pleistocene sites.

Peter Bellwood is a professor in the department of archaeology and anthropology, Australian National University. His research in the Moluccas was supported by grants from the National Geographic Society and the Australian Research Council. A revised edition of his Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago will be published by the University of Hawai’i Press this year.

Neanderthal Intelligence?

50,000 years ago people went to sea

In a stunning discovery, a team of archaeologists in Australia has found extensive remains of a sophisticated human community living 50,000 years ago. The remains were found in a rock shelter in the continent’s arid southern interior. Packed with a range of tools, decorative pigments, and animal bones, the shelter is a wide, roomy space located in the Flinders Ranges, which are the ancestral lands of the Adnyamathanha. The find overturns previous hypotheses of how humans colonized Australia, and it also proves that they interacted with now-extinct megafauna that ranged across the continent.

Dubbed the Warratyi site, the rock shelter sits above a landscape criss-crossed with deep gorges that would have flowed with water when Paleolithic humans lived here. From extensive excavations conducted last year, the archaeologists estimate that people occupied Warratyi on and off for 40,000 years, finally abandoning the site just 10,000 years ago.

By analyzing layers of earth in the shelter, the scientists were able to construct a timeline of settlement in the space. They used carbon dating on nuggets of hearth charcoal and eggshells to discover that the shelter was first occupied about 50,000 years ago. They also used a dating technique called optically simulated luminescence (OSL) on buried grains of quartz. This technique determines when those quartz grains last saw sunlight and heat. Both techniques returned similar dates, adding to the researchers’ confidence in their findings.

This makes Warratyi the oldest evidence of human occupation in the arid Australian interior, long believed too hostile for ancient people who had few tools. But these findings make it clear that the ancestors of Australia’s indigenous people were, in fact, seasoned explorers who could survive in difficult conditions.

Striking….and chilling….

This is a distraction but it’s too powerful to pass up, and it’s about the biggest and possibly baddest mountain on earth. This is a great video of a climb and really – I mean, really – takes you right there, and that’s a place that will stop your heart cold…

Ancient Shorelines

Check out this link – clear and compelling evidence that much, if not all, evidence of ancient human activity in North America may lie beneath the sea….This is Daryl Fedje discussing his excellent work near Haida Gwaii, the former Queen Charlotte Islands off the British Columbia Coast, and the site of two of my tales.

K2 – the savage mountain

My father was in the ski troops during World War 2, and he knew a lot of the men who before the war and afterwards turned to expedition climbing of the big mountains in Asia. He knew Bob Bates, who was on several K2 expeditions in the early 1950s, so as a kid I knew a little about this passion people had. Later, when I was 14, I did some climbing myself, in the Tetons, and I climbed with the Exum Climbing School a few times and even made it to the top of the Grand Teton. Barry Corbett was one of the guides at that school, and so was Jake Britenbach. Both men went to Everest in 1962-1963 and Barry Corbett made it to the summit. Jake Britenbach was killed in the icefall. I did some further rock climbing and winter mountaineering in New Hampshire in graduate school, with a childhood friend Jim Boicourt who was himself killed in 1976 in an avalanche in Colorado.

Mountain climbing is dangerous, and the high mountains really dangerous.I never had the burning fire to climb huge mountains or volcanoes, but I know plenty who have that fire. I think a special place exists for those people who tackle a mountain like K2, and the link here is to a terrible series of events on K2 by one expedition. This is a long damn way from the Pacific Northwest and the Olympic Peninsula, but some of the greatest mountaineers ever came from here and are still alive. One such was my next door neighbor, who died at 94 a few weeks ago after a long life as a halibut fisherman and climber. He climbed Mt. Rainier 40 times, the last time when he was 80. As a kid he went to Camp Parsons as a boy scout in the Olympics, the late 1920s, early 1930s, and he learned all he knew there, in those mountains.

 

 

 

 

Strong Heart

Impossible visions, great animals, ancient weapons, and a desperate voyage lead a lost young girl to discover who she really is. Tom Olsen, preparing to take a backpacking trip with his Native American friends to visit his own grandfather’s grave deep in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula wilderness, opens his door one stormy May night to find before him an angry thirteen year old girl.

The girl announces her name is Sarah Cooley and that Tom is her grandfather. She tells Tom he lives at the end of the earth. All she sees is dripping forest, tall trees, rain and wind. Astonished, all Tom sees is trouble. He knows he should cancel the trip so he can take Sarah in and place her in school, but when his friends suggest bringing Sarah along to visit his grandfathers, and her great-great grandfather’s gave, might teach her some sorely needed lessons about character, responsibility and grit, Tom reluctantly agrees.

All too soon they all start to wonder – are they taking Sarah Cooley on this journey, or is she taking them?

  I fell into a dark space, sliding on mud, a long way. I hit my head…Time passed…My leg hurt. I tried calling for help. I heard nothing… Later, I saw the yellow eyes of a bear. The bear was looking at me. I was not surprised to see the bear. The yellow eyes gave light so I could see. The bear watched me. 

We waited in the dark, lighted by the bear’s stare. We were waiting, together…

Available early 2017 from Iron Twine Press – For the Love of Books

           

           

New Orleans to New York by Sea March 2016

From Violet Louisiana to the shipyard in Bayonne New Jersey, a 42 year old 960-foot ro-ro ship, fourteen days. Crew flies in Wednesday and the madhouse begins. The steward is ready to quit, the second engineer maybe had a stroke, the new captain has his own set of rules, half the new crew are green and the other half greener still. Lash everything down, secure the watertight doors, set the watch routine, and cast off into the Mississippi River, starting downstream, only to anchor up 15 miles further with an engine problem.  New part arrives on a launch at midnight, we lift it aboard, and by dawn we’re off again. Everything held together with hope and wire, the engineers madly finding solutions, the rest of us steering and cleaning and lashing, crossing the Gulf, coming around Florida, then heading out into the Atlantic to burn our heavy fuel oil far from land, day after day doing donuts on the broad reach, back and forth. Hours – days – replacing the ballast water, pumping and sounding tanks and pumping again. The new steward’s assistant misbehaves with the cook and assistant cook, misbehaves badly, and is sent to swab decks far below for the balance of the trip. His name becomes Creepy. One sailor becomes sickened in the holds and goes to his room, another runs out of smokes and becomes insufferable, the food starts to run out, the milk goes, and the wind begins to blow. The big ship rolls and pounds, lashings shift and slide, nobody sleeps, the gale rages, the big crane hooks forward come loose and swing like death, one of the anchors breaks, the toilets stop flushing and the hot water system dies. No one is happy.

Now, finally, at anchor in New York, the bright skyline teasing, waiting for dry dock, everyone stumbling with fatigue, Creepy slinking the halls, the steward muttering, and the captain barking impossible orders everyone ignores.  But we are on the hook, in the Hudson, safe, and arrived.

Life is good.

 

 

Life is good

From Violet Louisiana to the shipyard in Bayonne New Jersey, a 42 year old 960-foot ro-ro ship, fourteen days. Crew flies in Wednesday and the madhouse begins. The steward is ready to quit, the second engineer maybe had a stroke, the new captain has his own set of rules, half the new crew are green and the other half greener still. Lash everything down, secure the watertight doors, set the watch routine, and cast off into the Mississippi River, starting downstream, only to anchor up 15 miles further with an engine problem.  New part arrives on a launch at midnight, we lift it aboard, and by dawn we’re off again. Everything held together with hope and wire, the engineers madly finding solutions, the rest of us steering and cleaning and lashing, crossing the Gulf, coming around Florida, then heading out into the Atlantic to burn our heavy fuel oil far from land, day after day doing donuts on the broad reach, back and forth. Hours – days – replacing the ballast water, pumping and sounding tanks and pumping again. The new steward’s assistant misbehaves with the cook and assistant cook, misbehaves badly, and is sent to swab decks far below for the balance of the trip. His name becomes Creepy. One sailor becomes sickened in the holds and goes to his room, another runs out of smokes and becomes insufferable, the food starts to run out, the milk goes, and the wind begins to blow. The big ship rolls and pounds, lashings shift and slide, nobody sleeps, the gale rages, the big crane hooks forward come loose and swing like death, one of the anchors breaks, the toilets stop flushing and the hot water system dies. No one is happy.

Now, finally, at anchor in New York, the bright skyline teasing, waiting for dry dock, everyone stumbling with fatigue, Creepy slinking the halls, the steward muttering, and the captain barking impossible orders everyone ignores.  But we are on the hook, in the Hudson, safe, and arrived.

Life is good.

 

 

Genomic evidence for the Pleistocene and recent population history of Native Americans

Science DOI: 10.1126/science.aab3884

Maanasa Raghavan1,*, Matthias Steinrücken2,3,4,*, Kelley Harris5,*, Stephan Schiffels6,*, Simon Rasmussen7,*, Michael DeGiorgio8,*, Anders Albrechtsen9,*, Cristina Valdiosera1,10,*, María C. Ávila-Arcos1,11,*, Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas1* et al.

How and when the Americas were populated remains contentious. Using ancient and modern genome-wide data, we find that the ancestors of all present-day Native Americans, including Athabascans and Amerindians, entered the Americas as a single migration wave from Siberia no earlier than 23 thousand years ago (KYA), and after no more than 8,000-year isolation period in Beringia. Following their arrival to the Americas, ancestral Native Americans diversified into two basal genetic branches around 13 KYA, one that is now dispersed across North and South America and the other is restricted to North America. Subsequent gene flow resulted in some Native Americans sharing ancestry with present-day East Asians (including Siberians) and, more distantly, Australo-Melanesians. Putative ‘Paleoamerican’ relict populations, including the historical Mexican Pericúes and South American Fuego-Patagonians, are not directly related to modern Australo-Melanesians as suggested by the Paleoamerican Model