Akar Nusa
A cave mouth as high as a church opens in the Borneo rainforest. Bats stream out at dusk. Long ago, people sat in this same spot, cooking, cutting up game, and gathering plants. One of them was buried here, and was found 40,000 years later.
The story
Niah Cave is a huge limestone cave in Sarawak. In February 1958, a team led by the archaeologist Tom Harrisson was digging in a trench at the West Mouth of the Great Cave when they found a human skull. It lay deep below the floor, so it was called the Deep Skull.
Early radiocarbon tests suggested it was about 40,000 years old. That made it one of the oldest modern human remains in Southeast Asia. For decades, though, scholars were not sure the dates were reliable, because the layers of the cave floor had been disturbed. A team led by Graham Barker returned in the early 2000s and dated the cave layers again with several methods. Their results place human activity at Niah from about 46,000 to about 34,000 years ago, and they showed the skull was not a later burial pushed into older ground. A university summary gives its age as about 37,000 years.
Who was the person? In 1960 the anatomist Don Brothwell studied the bones and thought they belonged to an adolescent male. A 2016 study led by Darren Curnoe at UNSW Sydney concluded the person was most likely a middle-aged woman, and found the skull most similar to people living in Borneo today, with few links to Indigenous Australians. Scholars still discuss these points, so we say what the evidence suggests, not what is certain.
The Niah evidence also shows how people lived. Barker's team found signs of hunting adapted to different habitats, and the collection and preparation of toxic plants for food. These people were skilled at living in tropical rainforest.
Where you can still see it today
- Niah National Park, Sarawak. The caves are open to visitors. A boardwalk leads through the forest to the Great Cave.
- The Sarawak Museum in Kuching. The Niah Deep Skull is kept there, according to the park's own guide.
- The forest around the caves. Treat the caves as a place that local communities know well, and follow the park's rules.
- The trench. Harrisson's "Hell Trench" can still be pointed out by guides.
What DNA can tell, and what it cannot
Old DNA has not been recovered from the Deep Skull, so there is no mother-line or father-line link we can claim. We make no DNA tie on this page.
What we can say is that people were living in Borneo's rainforest tens of thousands of years ago, and that the people who live there today may share some of their ancestry. A skull measurement can suggest a likeness, but it is not DNA and it is not proof of descent.
DNA cannot decide race, religion or bumiputera status, and no ancient skull can either. This page is about deep time, shared by everyone who lives on Borneo today.
