| Niah Caves | |
|---|---|
 The main entrance to the Niah Caves at sunset | |
  Location in Malaysia  Niah Caves (Malaysia) | |
| Coordinates | 3°48′50″N113°46′53″E / 3.81389°N 113.78139°E |
| Discovery | 1950 |
| Entrances | 1 |
Niah National Park, located within Miri Division, Sarawak, Malaysia, is the site of the Niah Caves limestone cave and archeological site.
Alfred Russel Wallace lived for 8 months at Simunjan District with a mining engineer, Robert Coulson, who had explored what is now northern Sarawak for mineral ores. [1] Coulson later wrote to Wallace about finding bones in a number of caves in Sarawak. On further enquiry, Wallace learned that one cave in question "was situated in the district between Sarawak and Bruni (Brunei), on a mountain some distance inland." [2] In March 1864, Wallace favoured Coulson to explore the caves. However, later in May 1864, G. J. Ricketts, a British Consul to Sarawak was appointed to undertake the work. Ricketts did not remain in the post for long and subsequently Alfred Hart Everett was chosen to undertake the work. Everett surveyed 32 caves in three areas, including Niah/Subis (near Miri) and "Upper Sarawak Proper" (to the south of Kuching, near Bau and Lundu areas). [1]
In the 1950s, Tom Harrisson, the curator of Sarawak State Museum was searching for evidence of ancient human activity in Sarawak. He came across Niah Cave, which showed no evidence of ancient human activity in the area. However, he inferred that since the cave was cool and dry and there were millions of bats and swiflets which can be used as food, ancient humans could have lived in the cave. Therefore, in October 1954, Harrisson with his two friends, Michael Tweedie and Hugh Gibb spent two weeks examining the Niah. They found evidence of long term human occupation, habitation, and burial. In 1957, the Sarawak museum organised a larger expedition with transport and equipment from Brunei Shell Petroleum and Sarawak Oilfields Ltd (Shell). [3] Eathernware, shell scrapers, shell ornaments, stone pounders, bone tools, and food remains were found. [3] Radiocarbon dating of the charcoal layers put the site at 40,000 years old, dating back to the Paleolithic era. [3] The expedition team led by Barbara Harrisson discovered the "Deep Skull" in the "Hell Trench" (for its unusually hot condition) at 101 to 110 inches below surface [4] in February 1958. [5] It is a partial skull with maxilla, two molar teeth and a portion of the base of the skull. The skull is highly fragile and is not fossilised. The morphology of the skull is suggestive of belonging to a female in her late teens to mid-twenties. Near the skull, a complete left femur and right proximal tibia were found which belongs to the same individual. [5] [6] Tom Harrisson also discovered Neolithic burial sites from 2,500 to 5,000 years ago. The discoveries led to more expeditions in 1959, 1965, and 1972. [5]
In 1960, Don Brothwell concluded that the Deep Skull belonged to an adolescent male who may be closely related to an indigenous Australian from Tasmania. [4] In the 1960s, 122 human remains from Niah were brought to Nevada, United States. [7] There is a lack of paleogeography, stratigraphy, and archeological relationships to support Tom Harrisson's work. [5] Therefore, more fieldwork was conducted by University of Leicester, in collaboration with other universities from Britain, Australia, United States and Sarawak State Museum from 2000 to 2003 [8] to establish a more detailed history of Niah Caves. [5] It was known as the "Niah Cave Project". [8] Another dating of the charcoal and the Deep Skull itself was done in 2000. [4] It showed the age of the skeleton to be 37,000 years old. [4] In 2006, studies from the Niah Cave Project found out that the ancient humans living in the Niah Caves probably already used mammal and fish trapping technologies, projectile technology, tuber digging, plant detoxification, and forest burning. [5] In 2013 to 2014, uranium–thorium dating also confirmed the age of the skull. [9] In 2016, further research done by Darren Curnoe noted that the Deep Skull was more resembling of a female adolescent and is more closely resembling the indigenous people of Borneo rather than Tasmanians or the two layer hypothesis which stated that original population of Southeast Asia were emigrated from Australia and later integrated with people from China. [4] [9]
In 2010 and 2021, the Sarawak state government nominated the park for an UNESCO's World Heritage Site title. [10] [11] [12] In 2020, all the 122 pieces of Niah human remains were returned to Sarawak. [13]
Niah Caves is located on the northern edge of a limestone mountain named Gunung Subis (Mount Subis). The entrance is located at the west mouth of the cave. The location is 15 km from the South China Sea and 50 m above sea level. The west mouth of the Niah Caves is 150 m wide and 75 m high. [5]
The cave is an important prehistorical site where human remains from 40,000 years ago have been found. [14] This is the oldest recorded human settlement in east Malaysia. More recent studies published in 2006 have shown evidence of the first human activity at the Niah caves from ca. 46,000 to 34,000 years ago. [15] Painted Cave, situated in a much smaller limestone block of its own, some 150 metres from the Great Cave block's south eastern tip, has rock paintings dated as 1,200 years old. Archeologists have claimed a much earlier date for stone tools found in the Mansuli valley, near Lahad Datu in Sabah, but precise dating analysis has not yet been published. [16]
Items found at Niah Cave include Pleistocene chopping tools and flakes, Neolithic axes, adzes, pottery, shell jewellery, boats, mats, then iron tools and ceramics and glass beads dating to the Iron Age. The most famous find is the human skull dated at around 38,000 years BCE. [17] [14] Painted Cave has paintings and wooden coffin 'death ships'.
Between 1954 and 1966, approximately 750,000 fragments of animal bones were excavated here. One of them was identified as the metacarpal bone of a young tiger. [18]
Pearce (2004) recognises six vegetation types: [19]
Limestone vegetation on karst.
Mixed Dipterocarp Forest.
Seasonal Swamp Forest on clayey marl soils.
Seasonal Swamp Forest on peat soils.
Riparian Forest.
Regenerating Forest.
The caves are also well known for the bird's nest industry. They are a popular tourist destination in Sarawak. Every section of the ceiling in the caves where there are swiftlets roosting is privately owned and only the owner has the right to collect the nests. Collection is done half-yearly (usually in January and in June). The collector climbs up hundreds of feet on a single pole to the cave ceiling and scrapes off the nest in flickering candlelight.
Miri is a coastal city in north-eastern Sarawak, Malaysia, located near the border of Brunei, on the island of Borneo. The city covers an area of 997.43 square kilometres (385.11 sq mi), located 798 kilometres (496 mi) north-east of Kuching and 329 kilometres (204 mi) south-west of Kota Kinabalu. Miri is the second-largest city in Sarawak, with a population of 356,900 as of 2020. The city is also the capital of Miri District, Miri Division.
Major Tom Harnett Harrisson, DSO OBE was a British polymath. In the course of his life he was an ornithologist, explorer, journalist, broadcaster, soldier, guerrilla, ethnologist, museum curator, archaeologist, documentarian, film-maker, conservationist and writer. Although often described as an anthropologist, and sometimes referred to as the "Barefoot Anthropologist", his degree studies at University of Cambridge, before he left to live in Oxford, were in natural sciences. He was a founder of the social observation organisation Mass-Observation. He conducted ornithological and anthropological research in Sarawak (1932) and the New Hebrides (1933–35), spent much of his life in Borneo and finished up in the US, the UK and France, before dying in a road accident in Thailand.
The year 1958 in archaeology involved some significant events.
Tabon Man refers to remains discovered in the Tabon Caves in Lipuun Point in Quezon, Palawan in the Philippines. They were discovered by Robert B. Fox, an American anthropologist of the National Museum of the Philippines, on May 28, 1962. These remains, the fossilized fragments of a skull of a female and the jawbones of three individuals dating back to 16,500 years ago, were the earliest known human remains in the Philippines, until a metatarsal from the Callao Man discovered in 2007 was dated in 2010 by uranium-series dating as being 67,000 years old. However, some scientists think additional evidence is necessary to confirm those fossils as a new species, rather than a locally adapted population of other Homo populations, such as H. erectus or Denisovan.
The black-capped fruit bat is a species of megabat in the monotypic genus Chironax.
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The History of Sarawak can be traced as far as 40,000 years ago to the paleolithic period where the earliest evidence of human settlement is found in the Niah caves. A series of Chinese ceramics dated from the 8th to 13th century AD was uncovered at the archeological site of Santubong. The coastal regions of Sarawak came under the influence of the Bruneian Empire in the 16th century. In 1839, James Brooke, a British explorer, first arrived in Sarawak. Sarawak was later governed by the Brooke family between 1841 and 1946. During World War II, it was occupied by the Japanese for three years. After the war, the last White Rajah, Charles Vyner Brooke, ceded Sarawak to Britain, and in 1946 it became a British Crown Colony. On 22 July 1963, Sarawak was granted self-government by the British. Following this, it became one of the founding members of the Federation of Malaysia, established on 16 September 1963. However, the federation was opposed by Indonesia, and this led to the three-year Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation. From 1960 to 1990, Sarawak experienced a communist insurgency.
The art of the Upper Paleolithic represents the oldest form of prehistoric art. Figurative art is present in Europe and Southeast Asia, beginning between about 40,000 to 35,000 years ago. Non-figurative cave paintings, consisting of hand stencils and simple geometric shapes, are somewhat older, at least 40,000 years old, and possibly as old as 64,000 years. This latter estimate is due to a controversial 2018 study based on uranium-thorium dating, which would imply Neanderthal authorship and qualify as art of the Middle Paleolithic.
Batu Niah is a small town in Miri Division, Sarawak, Malaysia. It is located at 3°48'0" N, 113°45'0" E on the island of Borneo.
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