British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Why were modern humans such successful colonisers? The archaeology of the Niah Caves, Sarawak: learning to live in rainforest
Professor Graeme Barker (The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge), on behalf of the Association for South-East Asian Studies (UK)
Recent excavations at the Niah Caves, Sarawak, Borneo, have revealed the strategies developed by modern humans 50,000 years ago to cope with the environments they encountered in Southeast Asia, with implications for why the ‘Out of Africa’ migrations were so successful.
The Association for South-East Asian Studies provided the critical funding to set this project up, with the bulk of the funding for subsequent fieldwork and laboratory analyses coming from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
For further information, visit www.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk/projects; www.britac.ac.uk/institutes/cseas/index.html
Summary
The West Mouth of Niah Great Cave
The Niah Caves on the coastal plain of Sarawak were the focus of major excavations by Tom and Barbara Harrisson in the 1950s and 1960s. What brought their work to international attention was their discovery of the skull of an anatomically-modern human dated by the (then) new radiocarbon method on charcoal fragments found nearby to about 40,000 years ago. The Harrissons also found evidence for the use of the cave in succeeding periods, making the Niah sequence as the longest and most important ‘archaeological history’ in Southeast Asia, but because the work was never fully published there have been debates ever since about the reliability of the results, especially regarding the antiquity of the Deep Skull.
Since 2000 Professor Graeme Barker has been coordinating a new investigation of the caves’ archaeology by a team of about 40 archaeologists and environmental scientists, from a dozen universities in Australia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and the USA as well as the UK.
The team has shown that modern humans started visiting the cave probably about 50,000 years ago, a date that means that the expansion of modern humans eastwards out of Africa must have been very rapid. The kind of forward planning, resourcefulness, and ingenuity to cope with living in unfamiliar environments that is displayed by the modern humans at Niah must have been a key factor in the successful colonization of Eurasia and the Americas in the late Pleistocene following modern humans’ expansion out of Africa.