Remarkable events happen at mundane moments.
It was getting late on Tuesday 2 September 2003, time for team co-director archaeologist Thomas Sutikna, 37, to call it a day at the Liang Bua (cool cave) dig in central Flores.
The Australian-Indonesia expedition had found bits of stegodon, a now extinct small elephant, and some stone tools. Interesting, but unexceptional, for the site had been dug over in the past though not deeply.
A thousand meters up in the Manggarai Highlands the weather is generally benign. Although shoveling sediments and shoring up diggings was tough, the environment was not. Problems were heavy rain scouring tracks, and as the island east of Bali is part of the Pacific Rim of Fire, the shakes.
Then came the quake which shook our understanding of human history. Benyamin Tarus was almost six meters down in a four square-meter pit. His tools swept the dirt as they’d done numerous times.
But this was different.
The local veteran of many digs shaved off the left eyebrow ridge of a skull; it was the kindest cut because the Trowel of Tarus sliced through conventional thinking on the origins of humanity.
He slowly exposed a cranium, then bones. “Fragile and soft,” recalls Sutikna..
Liang Bua was shelter - and gravesite. No headstone, so let’s call her Flo after her homeland.
She’d been buried where she lay. Resurrected more than 60,000 years after her death into a vastly different universe grappling to understand its origins; perhaps she could help show the way.
The scientists were astonished - they’d been seeking an early relative of Aboriginal Australians. Not Flo, though it took months of research to learn more.
Conventional wisdom has humans evolving in Africa and then spreading around the world. Suppose we’d originated in Asia? Was Flo, and others discovered later, human?
No. Although popularly known as hobbits, after the little folk in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, their scientific name is Homo floresiensis, not Homo sapiens (wise man). Their group is australopithecines, extinct relatives of humans, walking upright but with different anatomies.
“Now the questions are different,” said Sutikna, just returned from another dig at Liang Bua working with scientists from Indonesia, the US, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany and Australia,
“Where did she come from, and how did she get there? Flores has never been connected to other islands. Does she have relatives elsewhere? We just don’t know. Finding Flo was the most exciting moment in my career.”
Not just a moment for Sutikna, but the world. Yet Indonesia has still to recognize the importance of Liang Bua.
Sutikna, now an academic at Australia’s Woolongong Uni, has many questions and few answers. Not because he evades, but because archaeology is like working in a room with many doors and one key; this eventually opens into another room with even more locked doors.
Flo’s small size, just 1.1 meters, thick forearms and light weight - maybe 30 kilos - suggests a tree climber, handy when dodging snapping jaws of Komodo Dragons.
By the standards of modern humans she would have been athletic but no marathon runner as her feet were big and flat.
Her broad pelvis meant she had a pot belly. Her arms would have been more to the front than sides, so she wouldn’t have thrown stones. That useful survival skill was yet to evolve.
Her informal burial implies a sudden natural disaster, like a volcanic explosion and eruption of toxic gasses, killing her and her group and smothering them with sediment.
YET TO BE RECOGNIZED
There are eight UNESCO World Heritage sites in Indonesia. The most famous is Borobudur, the ninth century Buddhist temple in Central Java. It handles an average 7,000 sightseers a day.
Another is the Solo ‘fossil man’ site with an excellent museum about 15 kilometres outside the city. Weekends are especially busy.
Liang Bua, four hours drive east of Labuan Bajo, is not on the list; it gets three or four visitors a day, mainly from Europe. Occasionally an Australian or Indonesian drops by.
The cave is hauntingly spectacular, big enough for a lecture theater, about 50 meters wide at the mouth and 20 meters high but may have been larger - or smaller - during other geological upheavals. It slopes to a high back, ideal for avoiding predators.
Drooping from the roof is a forest of warped stalactites, strangely shaped by water seeping through mineral soils. Exposed tree roots pattern the walls. Bats roost among the crannies.
There’s a small museum set up with funds from the Indonesian National Centre for Archaeology (ARKENAS), Woolongong and New England Universities, and the US Smithsonian Human Origins Program.
But little for maintenance and improved access.
The museum needs upgrading, the surrounds purged of plastic. The site’s global significance warrants high-tech displays and knowledgeable multi-lingual staff.
Jatmiko, now a senior researcher at ARKENAS, was on the discovery team with Sutikna. “Promoting Liang Bua is a good idea which I support,” he said.
“But you must understand that managing and making it a tourist destination isn’t easy.
“Every year we excavate in the cave. We always ensure the local government knows it’s of world importance for studying human evolution, and for tourism.
“For a long time we’ve tried to collaborate with the local government, but no response.
“There are other important sites nearby. We’re scheduled to dig in the Soa Basin (Central Flores) in September, a site where 400,000 year old fossils have been found.”
But there’s only one Liang Bua, hobbit home, little known, rarely visited.
(First published in The Jakarta Post 13 November 2018 )
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