The Incredible Human Journey (22 page)

‘Ten years ago, there was no support for multiregionalism whatsoever,’ said Robert. ‘But support has grown. The only major remnant of strong support for African Eve is in England. You’re making a programme based on an outmoded theory.’

This sounded rather extreme to me, and I found this a bizarre point of view, as what actually seemed to be happening in palaeoanthropology was a growing consensus, based on both palaeontological and genetic research, in support of a recent African origin for modern humans. Robert appeared to be presenting the exact opposite of the sea change in (most) expert opinion that had actually taken place. So there we were: an Out of African and a Multiregionalist, stuck on a bamboo raft together for what would be ten and a half hours.

Despite our different views, Robert was an excellent captain. He kept an eye on everyone on the raft, and, when we needed to make decisions, it was democratic. He knew that the Indonesian sailors understood these waters and he took counsel from them before making a decision. Out on the very calm, open sea, with the tropical sun beating down on us, the most pressing dangers were not waves or sharks, but heat stroke and exhaustion. We had ample supplies of water and encouraged each other to keep drinking, shouting ‘
air minum
!’ (one of the few Indonesian phrases I had learnt: ‘drinking water’).

I felt quite isolated on the raft, even though I had the assurance of knowing that two small motor boats and one larger support boat were always around. They kept out of our way most of the time, circling us every now and then to film progress and check our water supply, but, generally speaking, we were on a long leash and felt independent. It was still good to know, though, that if something did go wrong we had help nearby – not like those Palaeolithic nautical adventurers.

After about five hours on the raft, Robert to start talking to me about how he had got started in archaeology. I was interested because I knew he wasn’t affiliated to a university. He had been a successful businessman for many years, then after early retirement he had decided to invest his time and money indulging his interest in archaeology – specifically in rock art and experimental nautical archaeology. He boasted about the huge numbers of papers (over a thousand) he had published in his short career. It all sounded very impressive, and it wasn’t until much later, when I was in Australia talking to rock art expert Sally May, from Flinders University, that I discovered Robert had published a good many of these articles himself, in his own journal.

Although Robert exhibited a slight tendency to self-aggrandisement, and seemed to have a general disdain for academic archaeology, I actually found him quite likeable. Underneath the often brash exterior there was a more personable man, someone who was fascinated by the past and who believed that the human spirit – ingenuity, creativity and adventure – had very ancient roots.

We paddled on and on. For hours, Lombok’s beaches appeared very close and Sumbawa still looked blue and very far away. It became quite disheartening to glance back, so I concentrated on what was ahead – rolling blue sea – and had a chat to Tokyo about sharks. I asked him if there were any in these seas, and he said that there were, and asked if I liked shark. This was a slight misunderstanding. I wasn’t interested in finding sharks to eat; I was more worried about them eating me.

But we didn’t see any sharks, and the sea was very calm, and the sun was shining. As we reached the middle of the channel between the islands, the water became a dark, dark blue, almost purple. The physical work of paddling provided a constant rhythm, and I felt myself drifting into meditative calm. Perhaps this journey was going to be much easier than I’d anticipated. Messing about in Palaeolithic boats seemed simple.

But then, as we got a little closer to Sumbawa, things started to change. First, the surface of the water became a little troubled. Soon after, the wind perceptibly picked up, and little white horses started to appear on the choppy water. And clouds had gathered over the mountains of Sumbawa, which looked closer now, but decidedly unwelcoming. The clouds spread, the sun went in and the sea got rougher.

On the raft we all put life jackets on and paddled with renewed energy. Sumbawa was so close now that we could make out sandy beaches. It looked as if there were plenty of places to land the raft. Although we were trying to direct the raft, we were really at the mercy of the currents, which became unpredictable as we neared land. Robert kept reassessing our position in respect of which bit of beach we were headed for, and we paddled accordingly. As we got closer, we could even see some houses – a little fishing village perhaps – along the beach we were approaching. The end was in sight. After about nine hours of paddling, fatigue was setting in, but there was an air of relief pervading the crew. The fishermen sang songs to help the paddles through the water, and, when they stopped, I taught them old Scout songs that my dad had taught me as a kid. ‘We’re riding along on the crest of a wave’ went down well, but not as well as ‘Gingangooly’, which they all thought was hilarious. Especially when I told them, via Tokyo, that it didn’t even mean anything in
English
.

As we continued on our course, we started to enter a bay with a long headland just to the south of us, and I spotted some very large breakers peeling off it towards us. I pointed at the waves and made wide-eyed faces and the fishermen laughed. They weren’t worried a bit – we were far enough away from them – then it gradually became apparent that we weren’t getting any closer to the shore. We were paddling very hard, but staying opposite the same part of the headland. Then, suddenly, we moving closer and closer to the rocky headland and
backwards
– right towards those breakers. We were caught in a very strong rip current, and there was absolutely nothing we could do. I radioed the support vessels, which were keeping a close eye on us now, while staying a safe distance from the breakers themselves. We stopped paddling and let the current take us – not into the breakers, but right back out to sea again. It was as though Sumbawa had lured us in and then spat us back out.

The current was now taking us south, down the coast of Sumbawa, so the idea of landing on the first beach we had spotted was abandoned. As we rounded the headland, we could see a row of small beaches separated by rocky spurs. Any one of them looked like a good landing site, if it hadn’t been for the almost continuous reef break flanking them. We needed to find a gap in the break that matched up with a beach – but there wasn’t one for a good two more kilometres down the coast. We were all very tired by now.

But we paddled on. We had come so far, it was impossible to imagine doing anything but finishing the trip, and by landing the raft, not abandoning it. Then we got stuck again: we had been paddling past the same headland (or trying to) for half an hour. Dusk was fast approaching, and it was clear that we would have to elicit some help from the twenty-first century. One of the support boats came up and we threw them a line, and were towed a few hundred yards, out of the rip.

And there it was: a gap in the breakers. Paddling furiously, we negotiated our way through unbroken waves, with great barrels of white water crashing down either side of us, but just running out before they got to us. It felt as if the raft was heaving itself over the waves, and you could see the whole thing twisting and bending as it rode the swell. But – it rode it. As we neared the shore, we were into smaller breakers, with waves rushing up between the bamboo and soaking us. We all stayed on the raft and continued paddling, until we were well into the shallows. Then everyone leapt off, and tried to manoeuvre the suddenly very unwieldy and dangerously heavy craft up and on to the beach. Safely on the sandy beach, I actually jumped up and down and hugged Robert Bednarik. It had taken us ten hours and twenty-five minutes. We had made it: our Palaeolithic voyage had been successful.

It had been an amazing experience. Most of the journey had been extremely easy – much more so than I’d expected. But in those last two hours it was as though the sea had decided to remind us who was boss. We had certainly proved the principle: that it’s possible to cross open sea on a bamboo raft made with stone tools, without a sail or a motor. It did make me wonder about the intention behind those early voyages, though. Just as we had been taken by currents and swept down the Sumbawa coasts, perhaps rogue currents had carried early fishermen, plying their craft along the coast, to new lands. The prevailing winds and currents between Indonesia and Australia would certainly have facilitated such an unintentional trip. Equally, those natural forces would have favoured a deliberate crossing, just as they do today: illegal immigrants can make their way from Timor to the Kimberley coast in three days, in motorless craft with small sails. Simulation studies suggest that the colonisation of Sahul would have been more purposeful than the old ‘pregnant woman aboard a log’ scenario, and that founding populations probably had some contact with parent populations.
¹⁴
Several researchers have argued that the most likely scenario was a process of disorganised colonisation, with numerous small bands of people from various Wallacean islands arriving in dribs at drabs, at many points along the northern Sahul coast at different times.
^8
,
10

What would they have found when they got there? They would have landed on a great coastal plain, some 200km wide. The vegetation may have been quite familiar to humans from the Wallacean islands. There was an expansion of tropical forest in Australia during OIS 3, peaking around 50,000 years ago,
¹⁵
but the animals would have been distinctly unfamiliar: strange-looking marsupials which had evolved along their own routes, in that isolated continent. Most of those animals would have been the marsupials still existing in Australia today, but others were truly monstrous: they included a giant constrictor,
Wonambi naracortensis
, an enormous carnivorous lizard,
Megalania prisca
, a huge emu-like bird,
Genyornis newtoni
, a rhinoceros-sized marsupial,
Diprotodon optatum
, and the 3m-tall giant kangaroo,
Procoptodon goliah
. Those giant ‘megafauna’ have all become extinct, and their demise seemed to coincide all too neatly with the arrival of humans.
¹⁰

It was time to make that journey to Australia myself.

Footprints and Fossils: Willandra Lakes, Australia

I flew over miles and miles of red land, criss-crossed by straight roads. It was immense, empty and dry. I flew into Mildura, a strangely cosmopolitan town in the middle of a semi-desert, late in the afternoon. That evening, I met up with archaeologist and Mungo National Park officer, Michael Westaway, along with a team of archaeologists who had arrived from various corners of Australia to revisit the lakes.

The following day, we piled our gear into Land Rovers and drove 113km north-east, and were very quickly on dusty, unsurfaced roads in a desert-like environment. The three Land Rovers kicked up a great cloud of dust behind them.

After a few hours we turned off the road and drove down a hill on to a flat plateau. Most of the drive had been over a low-lying landscape, with gentle rises and dips, so the hill was quite strange, and once we had driven down it I could see that it was actually part of a long, curved ridge stretching off into the distance, like a white wall in an otherwise featureless landscape. We pulled up at a cluster of low buildings: we had arrived at Mungo National Park Visitor Centre.

Michael Westaway pointed out the ridge that I had spotted as we approached, and told me that it was called the ‘Walls of China’. It may have been named by Chinese labourers who had worked on the sheep farm in the nineteenth century. The odd feature curved right around us, in a wide sweeping arc. There is no water in the Willandra Lakes system today: it all dried up thousands of years ago. What I was looking at on the horizon, that curving ridge, was a prehistoric lake shore. The flat plain was the dry lake bed. And then, among the scrubby bushes, I spotted my first kangaroo.

The Willandra Lakes system includes the dried-up relicts of nineteen interconnected lakes, including Lake Mungo, where the Visitor Centre was situated. I was rather confused about the history of the lakes: they had been wet for much of the Ice Age, and were dry now, which seemed the wrong way round. I was used to the broad concept of things being generally, globally, drier during glacial periods, with lower sea levels when so much water was locked up as ice, and conversely wetter, with higher sea levels during warmer periods, when the ice melted. But local geography is also important: during the Ice Age, the lakes were fed by run-off from the glaciers of the Eastern Australian Highlands. It seems that, when the world warmed up, the glaciers melted away, and, by about 18,000 years ago, with no water left to feed the lakes, they dried up.
¹

I stayed in the lodge at the Visitor Centre, situated between a small museum and an old shearing shed. My room was basic but comfortable, containing the essentials for a good night’s sleep in the middle of Australia: a bed and an air conditioner. There was another building containing a kitchen and a dining room, where someone had painted an enormous kangaroo on the wall, about 3m tall. This was an artist’s impression of
Procoptodon goliah
. It wasn’t the most accomplished painting I had ever seen, but, rather unnervingly, its eyes did follow you around the room.