Indonesian cultivators play a
crucial role in the search for human origins.
By Roy Larick, Russell L.
Ciochon, and Yahdi Zaim
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November 1998 was begin-ning to look like
the wrong time to search for ancestral human fossils in
Java. As we waited in the city of Bandung, ready to travel
to our base of operations in central Java, the monsoon rains
were relentless, and there was ominous news of turmoil that
might engulf the villages in which we were to work. The New
York Times had just run a front-page story on the vigi-lante
murders of nearly two hundred people in central and eastern
Java. The victims, accused of being "ninja sorcer-ers," were
suspected of being somehow responsible for the
assassinations of a number of Muslim political leaders. The
scale of rural violence, according to the Times, was
"difficult to comprehend" In the end, however, our
expedition was fairly peaceful. The skies turned cloud-less,
and our village contacts received us amid the fray.
Local residents have long been essen-tial
to paleoanthropological research in Java. The population of
this Indonesian island is large and densely settled. The
majority of people are small-scale farm-ers, and as they
work their plots, planting seeds or weeding, they
collectively in-spect a great quantity of earth. They thus
have a closer connection with the region's fossil beds than
professional paleoanthro-pologists could ever hope to
have--and they recover more evidence concerning human
evolution than do the experts. In-evitably, our research
drew us into the long-standing arrangement by which fos-sils
pass from resourceful local inhabitants into the hands of
scientists.
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With much of the face intact, Sangiran 17 is the most
complete
single skull of Homo erectus discovered to date in Asia.
The bone
is unusually thick, which may help account for its good
preservation.
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The fossils that we and other
paleoan-thropologists most eagerly pursue in Java belong to Homo
erectus. This hominid (a member of the group that includes hu-mans
and their close relatives) originated in Africa and may have given
rise to mod-ern humans there. Java holds key evi-dence that some
populations of H. erectus migrated to East Asia at an early
date.
Their arrival was once thought to have occurred
about 1 million years ago, but new evidence suggests that it may have
been closer to 2 million. At that time, continental drift was
reshaping isth-muses and straits around the globe, and the island of
Java was itself rising from the sea because of a combination of
uplift and volcanic accretion. As a result, various tropical African
mammals--including early hominids-- were able to disperse through the
Arabian Peninsula and across southern Asia. The emerging Indonesian
archipelago, with its warm climate, apparently offered an attractive
refuge for ho-minids wandering east. Seeking to learn more about what
the early island habitats were like, we pro-ceeded to the village of
Sangiran, legend-ary among paleoanthropologists because it lies smack
in the middle oF a ten-square-mile zone rich in H. erectus fossils.
The sedimentary beds there record the area's fitful emergence from
the sea and show that the earliest hominid specimens were preserved
in a large, brackish coastal swamp. Fast-flowing streams--whose beds
contain later fossils--replaced the swamp about 1.5 million years
ago. The conventional wisdom is that neither
this swamp nor these stream banks were good habitats for H. erectus.
More likely, it is thought, these early hominids lived on the edge of
the swamp and rarely set foot in the Sangiran area itself, and only
after death did some of their bones wash downstream into the
low-lying area.
This haphazard accumulation has been taken to be
the reason why so many H. erectus fossils have turned up in
Sangi-rans sedimentary beds, a soft-rock sand-wich of swamp-bottom
clay and streambed sand, all inteleaved with layers of volcanic ash
and pumice. The volcanic levels are amenable to radiometric dating,
and the most current analysis suggests that H. erectus lived in or
near Sangiran for nealy 2 million years. Toward the end of this
period, about 120,000 years ago, very localized volcanic pressure
began to uplift the rock sandwich at Sangiran. The resul-tant "dome"
has been vulnerable to ero-sion in this humid environment, with rain
and stream flow outpacing the uplift. Consequently the dome is now
actually a depression, whose steep flanks and inter-nal hummocks
yield many mammal bones, including those of H. erectus.
The presence of early hominid fossils in Java
first came to the attention of the scientific world in 1893, when the
Dutch surgeon and geologist Eugene Dubois re-ported his excavation of
a skullcap and thighbone of H. erectus at the site of Trinil (about
forty miles east of the Sangiran dome). Dubois also searched in
Sangiran, but without success. He was fol-lowed in the 1930s by the
paleo-anthropologist Ralph von Koenigswald--"von K," as he is
affectionately remembered in the region. Von K's own surveys in
Sangiran also proved disappoint-ing, so he tried an indirect
ap-proach, offering a bounty to local residents who found fossils.
Skull and dental fossils were the most prized during these early days
of paleoanthropology, because they were considered to provide the
most information for distinguishing ho-minid species. Cultivators
found Sangi-fans first hominid fossil--a jaw--in 1936.
Von K initially paid for finds by the piece. But
he soon found he was receiving the broken fragments of larger
specimens and thus began advertising premiums for complete fossils.
He also moved quickly to excavate at discovery sites to retrieve
natu-rally fragmented specimens, and he em-ployed a few middlemen to
procure dis-coveries from around the area. By 1942 (when the Japanese
occupied Java and im-prisoned von K, ending his enterprise), Sangiran
farmers had collected eight sig-nificant hominid fossils and about
ninety isolated teeth, and middlemen had estab-lished themselves as
entrepreneurial agents in a burgeoning fossil trade.
Collecting almost ceased with von Ks departure:
only two significant fossils came to light between 1942 and 1960. The
rate of discovery began to climb dur-ing the 1960s, however, and now
scien-tists can expect, on average, two signifi-cant finds each year.
One reason is that by the early 1960s, two Indonesian
paleoan-thropologists--Teuku Jacob and the late Sastrohamijoyo
Sartono--had taken over von Ks work, competing with each other to
reestablish the old collection networks and to amass new finds. In
addition, Java's growing rural
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population had turned nearly the entire
island over to intensive cultivation. In the fertile but
rugged San-giran dome, farmers have extended rice-paddy
terraces onto the region's hum-mocks and flanks, and largely
as a result, some seventy additional hominid cranial and Jaw
fragments and a smaller number of isolated teeth have turned
up since 1963. In contrast, planned scientific exca-vations
at "hot spots" during these same years have yielded only a
few teeth and a fragment of thigh bone.
On our recent trip we met a farmer, Bocah
Tani (a pseudonym), who as a young man had found Sangiran
17, the most complete early H. erectus skull in all of Asia.
He made his discovery in 1969 while creating new terraces on
his land and turned the skull over to Sartono. The purchase
price, though small in Western terms, provided Tani with the
means to attract a spouse and revitalize the family farm.
His fame spread, and during the past thirty years scores of
scientists and tourists have beaten a path to his farm,
hoping to see something new.
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As they work the [and, Java's
army of cultivators
uncover more fossils than
do the few scientific excavators.
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Another farmer we looked up, Pem-buru Balung
(also a pseudonym), aug-ments his income by digging for fossils and
selling his finds to local entrepreneurs or directly to tourists. He
has a number of secret locales to which he returns regularly during
the wet season, when the earth is easier to dig. His efforts net
fossils from a wide range of animals: buffalo, elephant, rhino,
hippo, crocodile, and turtle. Be-cause profit is his motive, Balung
rejects all but the larger, more marketable fragments. If he
dis-covered a hominid fossil, he would try to sell it without
re-vealing where it was found. Balung was happy to let us inspect his
collection of several hundred choice pieces but allowed no
photographs; with a collection this large, he was running serious
legal risks. The Indonesian Cultural Protection Law states that all
vertebrate fossils, including hominids, are the property of the
government: all discoveries must be reported, all materials must be
given over, and nothing may leave the country.
At the Museum of Paleontology in Sangiran village,
one is likely to come across a local fossil entrepreneur, or
"commercial man." Someone we shall call Pedagang is one such agent.
He buys from Balung and keeps track of cultivators like Tani.
Pedagang and others like him are allowed to set up retail kiosks on
the museum grounds to sell a selection of fos-sils and other
geological specimens. Peda-gang employs an assistant to operate his
kiosk, leaving him free to guide the more lucrative "human evolution
tours:"
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Who has the right to Indonesia's fossils:
the discoverers, traders. collectors, scientists, or
government?
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Pedagang developed his interest in fossils as a
boy in the late 1970s, when the national government excavated an
irriga-tion canal in the region- The digging near his home brought to
light two important hominid skull fragments. Pedagang got to know a
number of the students and pro-fessionals who were attracted to the
site, and now they keep him informed about research on human
evolution in exchange for his knowledge of fossil finds.
Some may wonder whether scientific work is
compromised by a system that trades in hard evidence and whether it
is even ethical to pay fossil collectors and agents for specimens.
Realistically, how-ever, the fossil trade has been a small price to
pay for research in Sangiran, especially con-sidering the fate
speci-mens would otherwise suffer in such a heavily farmed landscape.
Of greater concern is how Indonesia's economic and political
reformation may alter buyer-seller rela-tionships. A market
ori-entation now permeates all levels of Javanese society. Farmers
who once relied more on barter are increasingly drawn into the cash
economy--and yet cash is always scarce. Fossils can be ex-pected to
become ever more important income-producing commodities. Already, the
kinds of fossils that Indonesian scien-tists were once able to
purchase for their institutions at low cost are becoming too
expensive for tight budgets. Western sci-entific programs must now
assist by step-ping in with their greater resources.
To us, the most troublesome aspect of the fossil
trade is that it reflects 1930s-style professional interests. Von K
needed cra-ma, jaws, and teeth just to prove the exis-tence of
ancient hominids in Sangiran. Local collectors responded to his needs
(and his rewards). But paleoanthroopologY now has different goals.
For example, body bones are at least as important as the skull for
understanding human origins. How-ever, of the roughly eighty hominid
fossils found to date in Sangiran (not counting the scores of
isolated teeth), only one is a body bone- thigh fragment excavated by
a Franco-Indonesian team in 1992. It is true that hominid body bones
usually do not fossilize as well as teeth and jaws do, but a
significant reason for the imbalance appears to be that the fossil
trade itself is se-lective. Can the old collecting patterns at
Sangiran evolve to sevee the more special-ized studies of the new
millenium?
Our recent expedition had three sci-entific
highlights. First, we examined a nearly complete H. erectus skull
that had worked its way through the collecting network. One of our
students is currently preparing the first scientific report about
this specimen. Second, we recovered fragments of
paleosols--fossilized ground surfaces--in the old swamp and stream
deposits. These paleosols mark the rare episodes when the wetlands
dried out enough to create habitats likely to attract hominid groups.
During the nearly 2 million years that H. erectus lived on Java, the
Sangiran area may have been habit-able for fewer than a dozen short
periods.
Third, we made progress on a frustrat-ing
archaeological problem: in this re-gion, early H, erectus fossils are
rarely found together with stone tools. Re-cently,
paleoanthropologist Kildo Choi and archaeologist Dubel Driwantoro
have detected stone-tool cut marks on some large mammal bones found
in Sangiran--sure signs of ancient butchery. To identify the closest
sources of stone suitable for making tools, we inventoried the
out-crops of volcanic debris bordering the old Sangiran swamp. We
suspect that an early H. erectus archaeological site (containing,
perhaps some butchered mammal bones and a few stone tools) will one
day be found within a paleosol not far from such a stone outcrop. We
are now preparing to survey these fossilized landscapes.
One may ask who has the greater right to Java's
valuable paleoanthropological material-- the government that
officially controls it, the scientists who wish to study it, the
agents who want to profit by it, or the individuals who seek to
acquire it for private collections? In reality, the In-donesian
government does not have the means to enforce its strict regulations,
so the trade arrangements that have prevailed over the past seventy
years can be ex-pected to continue. Paleoanthropologists who hope to
comprehend Sangiran's pro-lific fossil record must therefore
under-stand and appreciate the role of the fossil trade both in
filtering the evidence and in making scientific work possible.
Web Design by Jason Ruyle, May 2000.
Updated: By Dustin Roth May, 2002