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Relics

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

FOREWORD BY CRISTINA GOETTSCH MITTERMEIER.....................XIntroduction..................................................XIIThe Land of the Unexpected....................................1Travels in the Meddle Earth...................................55Mother's Care.................................................79The Southern Kingdom..........................................97The Rain Queen's Garden.......................................147Atewa.........................................................175Guiana Shield.................................................211The Yin and Yang of the Notoptera.............................241The Great Ocean Escape........................................257In the Sagebrush..............................................279A Walk in the Estabrook Woods.................................295A WORD ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY......................................326ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...............................................330NOTES.........................................................332INDEX.........................................................337

Chapter One

If there ever was a moment in my life when I wished that I could simply close my ears shut, it was when we flew over the foothills of the Nakanai Mountains—the seemingly infinite carpet of thick forest below us, the wisps of the early morning fog clinging to clumps of the tallest trees, the oblique shafts of the still coy sun piercing the darkness below. We skimmed close to the canopy, lifting up only occasionally to avoid hills rising out from the mostly uninterrupted terrain. The view from the helicopter was transcendent of anything that I had seen before, but the roar of the blades held me like claws, not letting me slip into the nearly cataleptic wonderment I was so close to achieving. Never before had I witnessed such raw, undefiled scenery, so primeval, so innocent. I wanted to glide over its surface in silence for hours, breathe in the mist, let my fingers caress the tips of the trees the way I let my hand touch the water when floating slowly in a canoe. I wanted to be marooned in this place, this sanctuary of life still secure in its remoteness and unique for its isolation, but a burst of static in my headphones snapped me out of my reverie. "We found them," said the pilot.

For the last couple of days we had been trying to locate a camp set up by a few members of our group on a high plateau in these mountains covered with nearly impenetrable rainforest, which at this high elevation was obscured by clouds throughout most of each day. We were too late the day before and had to turn back to our lower camp, unwilling to risk flying in poor visibility. But this morning we lifted up right at dawn, and large gaps in the cloud cover allowed us to spot a makeshift landing platform in a small clearing within the thick bamboo and southern beech (Nothofagus) forest. The chopper landed on the edge of a plateau with a view so surreally beautiful and primordial that I instantly understood why cryptozoological myths of dinosaurs surviving in the forests of Papua New Guinea persist to this day.

And why wouldn't they? Few places are more remote, less disturbed, and have ecosystems as rich as this part of the planet. The island of New Guinea, its western half a part of Indonesia and the eastern half making up the main portion of the country of Papua New Guinea, still shelters a fragment of the world that would appear very familiar to our long-gone ancestors. It was not until 1938 that a large society of Stone Age people was first contacted on the island of New Guinea by the explorer Richard Archbold, its 50,000 members blissfully unaware of the existence of the outside world. For over a hundred years this island has been a mecca for anthropologists of various extractions attracted by both the "primitiveness" of its tribes and the sheer number of distinct clans inhabiting the island. In an area about thirteen times smaller than Europe, over 1,000 tribes, each with its own unique language, have until recently lived in exactly the same fashion as their forefathers did thousands of years ago, happily dividing their time between foraging in their pristine forests and head-hunting their foes. There is probably no other place in the world, New York City included, more anthropologically heterogeneous, more finely divided among small, isolationist groups of people. Linguists still ponder the origins of the 1,114 languages spoken to this day on New Guinea (albeit some spoken by only a handful of the last survivors of their line), with strong evidence pointing to multiple colonization events by different groups coming from Australia and Southeast Asia that stretch back to at least 40,000—perhaps even 60,000—years ago. Following the time-honored human tradition of distrusting those who are different from us, this multifarious status quo has been maintained by a nearly constant state of war among neighboring tribes, precluding any possible attempts at collaboration toward common goals, such as building roads or developing large-scale trade across the island. It did not help, of course, that New Guinea is one of the most mountainous terrains on Earth, crisscrossed by deep valleys abutted by swampy, malaria-infested lowlands. But the same factors that contributed to the fragmentation of New Guinea's human societies have had remarkably beneficial effects on its nonhuman inhabitants.

Surpassed in their surface area only by the immense forests of the Amazon and Congo basin, the rainforests of New Guinea are the tropical forests probably the least-impacted by human activity. It is still possible to find places there where no human has ever set foot and animals are trusting and unafraid. But even in places where hunting has made a significant dent in the populations of large mammals and birds, the rest of the ecosystem is often in a pretty good shape, thanks largely to the very low population density of humans. Although many tribes still practice slash-and-burn agriculture, the scale on which they do it is low enough for the forest to quickly regenerate. And while there exists ample archeological evidence that some parts of the island's forest that appear pristine are in fact secondary growth and that slopes of many mountains have been reshaped by ancient agricultural practices, the forests of New Guinea are closer to nature's prehuman condition than virtually any other similar place in the world. For this reason it is not only anthropologists who get positively giddy when talking about New Guinea's diversity. New Guinea, an area legendarily difficult to explore, is renowned for being a place where a biologist is virtually guaranteed to discover new forms of life every time she or he pays a visit. Scientists can only estimate the numbers of species for most groups of organisms that live there, and these estimates are usually higher than those for any comparable area anywhere else on the globe.

Nearly everything about New Guinea seems ancient and prehistoric, and it often is, but the island itself is surprisingly young. As recently as ten thousand to fifteen thousand years ago, at the end of the last glacial maximum, New Guinea was firmly attached to Australia, forming a large continent known as Sahul. The Gulf of Carpentaria that now separates Australia from New Guinea...