50,000 YEARS OF STONE AGE CULTURE IN BORNEO — HARRISSON 527 



cave, it has been so naturally and slowly dehydrated that bone and 

 shell simply continue until they expire. 



Below 120 inches — and we are now working well below this — the 

 main indications of human activity are through chemical analyses of 

 the "soil" (which have been undertaken for us by Dr. C A. Sutton 

 and others), by certain pollens (on which we have been working with 

 the Shell laboratories), and by the presence of stone tools and fire 

 strikers. 



Stone tools are, of course, the clearest indication of all. But here 

 we come up against another peculiarity of Niah and West Borneo 

 generally. There is a great shortage of durable, workable stone 

 throughout the area — even of rough stone suitable for roadmaking. 

 Whereas in Sabah, Malayan, Thai, and Palawan caves large quan- 

 tities of stone tools are generally found, all through West Borneo hard 

 stone has been sparse, and was clearly precious to early man. At the 

 deeper levels we are finding only very small, fine flakes of quartzite. 

 Even in the late Neolithic, when there was clearly much mobility and 

 even sea traffic, the polished stone tools are quite few and far between 

 in the excavation. By presistence over the years, we have now ac- 

 quired a good series for the whole deposit. But it is not unusual, with 

 a team of up to 50 or so working, to recover no more than one stone tool 

 during the day. Correspondingly, there has been an elaboration of 

 bone tools, on which Lord Medway and I have recently published a 

 first attempt at an 18-category typology. 



It is quite possible that as we continue lower at Niah we shall come 

 to a level of true f ossilization ; or, anyway, limification. Otherwise, 

 we have little chance of fijiding ^YQ-Homo skeletal remains such as 

 Pithecanthro'pus. We may now reach that sort of depth by 1965. 

 Meanwhile, common sense suggests that such early hominids were 

 present in Borneo, which had a land link with Java and "Java men" 

 in the Pleistocene. We have recently recovered, in a bauxite mine near 

 Kuching, two large stone tools which may Avell belong to that "cul- 

 ture," as described by Dr. von Koenigswald and Dubois. 



Of particular interest in tliis comiection is the presence, in the "Hell" 

 deposit at Niah, of the extinct giant pangolin, Mainis palaeojavanica 

 (Dubois). This was previously described from the fossil beds of 

 Trinil in Java associated with Pithecanthropus. The curator of the 

 Dubois Collection at Leyden, Dr. Hooijer, has now identified from 

 Niah a series of bones of this huge, scaly anteater — in of course non- 

 fossil condition — extending to the limit of our bone surAdval depth in 

 "Hell." It has not been found in the high levels. 



In the higher levels, for which we have a series of publisiied carbon- 

 14 dates, and others in preparation, I very provisionall}^ put forward 

 the crude tabulation shown in table 1. 



