Today our merry band was augmented by Bagas, Irvan's best friend and a promising star in the geologic community of Indonesia. I had met him a couple of years ago and really like him. Serious and very meticulous, he has finished his Masters (weird topic he describes as Geotourism) and is now a lecturer at a university in a nearby city. Geology is a very popular subject at Indonesian universities, so he has 60 to 75 students in each of his three classes, all very quiet and respectful, who receive his wisdom in total silence and never ask any questions (and we all know how taxing it is to have a non-responsive audience). Then he has to write, give, and grade exams for 150 students! So he works very hard and his only solace is to come to Yogya on the weekends, to spend time with his buddy Irvan. Because of the geoturism thing he was the perfect guide for our exploration of "The Man of Java", or the expansion of Homo erectus into Sumatra and Java about 700,000 years ago.
The core area of interest is near the town of Surakarta, about 80 km east-northeast of Yogya, and to get there we had hired a car with a driver. Traffic was comparatively light, and our driver is excellent, so in about 2 hours we navigated our way through a maze of small towns to get there. On the way there we saw a very peculiar parade. Turns out today is the Muslim New Year, and folks celebrate by getting together and building, on the bed of a suitable truck, a "tree" about 4 ft tall, in the shape of a pine tree, but made out of leaves of lettuce, cucumbers, bananas, egg plant, and carrots. The final product is very colorful, and the various groups proudly display their floats by parading them across town. Reminds me of the Vietnamese custom of shaping young orange trees like pine trees, letting the young oranges be the decoration.
The area where the original discoveries were made is in a very young anticline, where recent deformation has buckled the stratigraphy to expose a beautiful regressive sequence, with very soft marine shales bioturbated by innumerable gastropods (picking fossils is child's play) at the base, covered by estuarine deposits with fossils of crocodiles and hippos, which in turn give way to fluvial deposits that range in age between 750,000 and 250,000 years ago. It is in these sediments that a dozen or more specimens of Homo erectus have been found, together with the fossils of mammoths, elephants, bovines, deers, and saber-tooth tigers. The last layer of the stratigraphy is a lahar deposit, probably derived from the volcano to the east, whose name I don't remember.
There are several museums in the area, but the first one we stopped at used the natural slope of the land to give an excellent explanation of the stratigraphy and geologic history of the area, while also introducing copies of the most significant human skulls and the characteristic stone technologies used. Imagine my surprise when, to the usual assortment of simple chips used for scraping and cutting, common across the erectus world, I also saw carefully crafted bolas! These bolas are known from Neanderthal sites, but I most recently saw them in Argentina, where they were one of the main hunting tools before the development of the throwing spear or the bow and arrow. The indians of Patagonia wrap them in hide, attach a long cord, and in groups of two or three whirl them around their heads to tangle the legs of a fleeing prey. I think that is what these bolas were used for, although the explanation on the big museum is that they were simple thrown by hand (nobody would put the time and effort to chip a perfect ball of stone just to throw it away). So that is my story and I am sticking to it: Our ancestors were active hunters that discovered the bolas as a hunting breakthrough.
Alternatively they could have invented baseball and the knuckle ball throw.
The big museum, the Sangiran Museum or Museum Manusia, is a real tour de force, full of dioramas and cool explanations about the evolution of the universe, basic geologic principles, and key events in the development of the theory of evolution (including an honorable mention of Wallace, who working in Indonesia and Malaysia came to the same basic conclusions as Darwin did). A good part of the museum is devoted to the techniques of paleoanthropology and vertebrate paleontology, and are beautifully complemented by the models of fauna and hominids present in the area (the kids shown are particularly hideous, which makes me wonder about the kids of the artist). I even got to see a reconstruction of the little guy, Homo erectus floresiensis.
After a great day talking geology and fossils with my two younger colleagues we headed back, but by this time traffic was fierce, and despite our masterful driver it took us almost three hours to get back home. We were a bit rushed because we were having dinner with my friends Gayatri and Hurieh (aka Henry) and their two kids, Newa of 19 and Dennali of 7.
Dinner was a lovely affair, with easy conversation and good memories from when we first met, two years ago. Gayatri is a professor of Structural Geology at UGM (she is Irvan's Master's adviser), Henry is doing his PhD in Geothermal Energy at UGM at the same time he lectures at the Technological Institute, Newa just finished high school and is ready to start her undergrad in Geology/Geochemistry, and Dennali is getting ready to start First Grade, with the plan of becoming a YouTuber (but when I tried to interview him while pointing my cell phone camera at him he squirmed to quickly hide away). They are a lovely family and I am glad we had a chance to visit with each other.
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