Niah caves

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Niah caves

The main entrance to the Niah Caves. Some of the excavations were made in the area shown in the lower right of the picture.

The main entrance to the Niah Caves. Some of the excavations were made in the area shown in the lower right of the picture.
Location: Sarawak , Malaysia , Borneo Island
Geographic
location: 		3 ° 48 '50 "  N , 113 ° 46' 53"  E Coordinates: 3 ° 48 '50 "  N , 113 ° 46' 53"  E
Niah Caves (Malaysia)
Niah caves
Overall length: 1000 m
Website: http://www.forestry.sarawak.gov.my/forweb/np/np/niah.htm
The Great Cave, view from the outside inside

The Niah Caves are located in the district of Miri in Sarawak , Malaysia , on the island of Borneo . They are a major tourist attraction in Sarawak and are known for their " swallow nests " (built by salangans ). The main cave is also an important archaeological and paleoanthropological site.

Location and shape

The caves are part of the Niah National Park . Niah National Park was 31.4 km² when it was founded in 1974.

The main cave, the Great Cave of Niah, is located in a limestone mountain called "Subis" and consists of a number of voluminous chambers with very high ceilings. It is about a kilometer long in a north-south direction and about half a kilometer wide. It is separated from the main complex of Gunung Subis by a valley that is approximately 150 to 200 meters wide.

The Gunung Subis complex is approximately 394 meters above sea level at its highest point. The entire Gunung Subis limestone complex is located approximately 17 kilometers from the South China Sea inland and 65 kilometers west of the city of Miri . It is roughly the shape of a heart, three kilometers north to south and four kilometers in width. The mountain (Gunung) Subis is surrounded by flat land with gently sloping hills, from which the limestone massif rises quite abruptly from the jungle . Some cliffs are over 100 meters high. Although this cave system is not very large compared to others in Sarawak, it has been estimated that it covers approximately 10 hectares and that the cave roof rises 75 meters in some places. In geological terms, the limestone is part of the Subis formation. It dates back approximately 20 to 16 million years to the early Miocene .

Archaeological and paleoanthropological finds

On the basis of fossils it has been proven that anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) stayed in the Great Cave of Niah as early as the Upper Pleistocene ; a total of more than 250 individual bones and partial skeletal bones were discovered. The most significant find is a human skull (known as " Deep Skull "), which was discovered in 1958 and whose age was dated to 45,000 to 39,000 years; the find is the oldest evidence of the presence of Homo sapiens on the Southeast Asian islands.

The exploration of the caves was started by Tom Harrisson in collaboration with Barbara Harrisson in the 1950s and 1960s. Since then, local universities and foreign scientists have been researching continuously, and many articles have been published about the caves, especially in the Sarawak Museum Journal. For example, the site was re-examined from 1999 to 2003 by a British-Malaysian research group in order to check the accuracy of the work of both Harrisons, for example with the help of newer dating methods.

Items found in the Niah caves include tools from the Pleistocene , Neolithic axes, disc axes ( dexels ), pottery , shell jewelry, boats, wickerwork, and, more recently , iron tools, glass and ceramics from the Iron Age .

The “picture cave”, located in its own, much smaller limestone rock , contains rock carvings that are around 1200 years old, including wooden coffins designed as “death ships”.

See also

literature

  • Mark Stephens, James Rose, DD Gilbertson, Matthew G. Canti: Micromorphology of cave sediments in the humid tropics: Niah Cave, Sarawak. In: Asian Perspectives. Volume 44, No. 1, 2005, pp. 42-55, doi: 10.1353 / asi.2005.0014 .
  • Graeme Barker et al .: The 'human revolution' in lowland tropical Southeast Asia: the antiquity and behavior of anatomically modern humans at Niah Cave (Sarawak, Borneo). In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 52, No. 3, 2007, pp. 243-261, doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2006.08.011

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Information on Niah National Park from the Sarawak Forest Service
  2. ^ Niah National Park
  3. ↑ a b Short description for a CD-ROM about the caves by Ecomedia Software
  4. ^ "The Great Cave of Niah" by Huw Barton
  5. ↑ Darren Curnoe, Ipoi Datan, Jian-xin Zhao et al .: Rare Late Pleistocene-early Holocene human mandibles from the Niah Caves (Sarawak, Borneo). In: PLoS ONE. 13 (6): e0196633, doi: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0196633
  6. ↑ Darren Curnoe, Ipoi Datan, Paul SC Taçon, Charles Leh Moi Ung and Mohammad S. Sauffi: Deep Skull from Niah Cave and the Pleistocene Peopling of Southeast Asia. In: Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. Online publication from June 27, 2016, doi: 10.3389 / fevo.2016.00075
  7. ^ Tom Harrison, The Great Cave of Niah: A Preliminary report on Bornean Prehistory . In: Man. Volume 57, 1957, pp. 161–166, full text (PDF)
  8. ^ The Niah Cave Project. Former University of Leicester website.