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The Enigma of Kow Swamp

Now Esau, my brother, was an hairy man and I am a smooth man." Genesis 27:11

Recent discoveries relating to the presence of Homo erectus in Java during the late Pleistocene are summarised. The implications of their presence in relation to the colonisation of Australia are explored. A description of Kow Swamp and a brief history of the 'archaic' human fossils discovered there are presented. Could prehistoric Australia have been colonised now extinct relatives of the human race? Did Australia play a part in the evolution of modern humans?

NOTE, 2009: This article was written prior to the discovery of the "Hobbits", Homo floresiensis, on the island of Flores in the Republic of Indonesia. This discovery entirely changes the picture we have of late surviving hominins. Perhaps one day we will write more on this topic ...

In Search of Australia's 'Archaic' Humans.

Ian Hynes at Kow Swamp Back in May, 1999, we travelled to Kow Swamp to take some pictures and have a general look around. The story of Australia's "archaics" is so thoroughly intriguing that we have been collecting the original papers relating to the discoveries and we wanted to view the actual sites for ourselves. Read the attached article, linked below, to see what we've got so far. The Road to Kow Swamp Let me assure interested parties that my approach was strictly on the basis of "looking but no touching". While we have the greatest respect for aboriginal Australians and their cultural myths, we think the question of whether the people found buried here can truthfully be said to be the ancestors of local indigenes is extremely doubtful. However, certain lobby groups appear to have so claimed them and we have no special desire to buy into the argument.

KS05 Kow Swamp lies in northern Victoria near the town of Cohuna on the Murray River. It is a large, roughly oval shaped, body of fresh water which supports a rich population of water fowl. Thick marshes make its northern end impenetrable. A snake's idea of heaven, by the look of it. The surrounding country is open farmland, flat as a billiard table from horizon to horizon : we're standing in the Murray River's flood plain after all. The only high ground visible in any direction is Mount Hope, a rocky outcrop a few miles to the south west of Kow Swamp.

Near the KS1 burial site The lake's level is maintained by Taylor's Creek, which supplies water from the Murray River: The creek has been extensively reconstructed by irrigation earthworks. Water is drained from the swamp by means of irrigation channels at its western and northern sides and, after supplying irrigation to farms, is returned to the Murray River. Virtually the entire length of the Murray, from Albury to the South Australian border is an irrigation district. The river's water is used and re-used before it reaches the sea.

Why here?

We made the trip up here because, beginning in the 1920's and culminating in the 1970's, a series of remarkable palaeoanthropological discoveries were made on the shores of this swamp. Before the coming of Europeans, the Murray Basin supported, by hunter gatherer standards, a dense population of Native Australians. These people are, of course, fully modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, the same as the European immigrants. Naturally, aboriginal grave sites are to be found in many places along the Murray.

KS type cranium However, burials have been uncovered in many sites around south eastern Australia whose occupants appear to possess a cranial morphology reminiscent of a much earlier species of humanity, Homo erectus. The remarkable thing about these people is the recent dates attached to such burials: anything from 13,000 up to 6,000 ybp. It means that there was a population living in southern Australia up until comparatively recent prehistoric times who appeared to have retained traits deriving from an ancient human forebear.

Moreover, the oldest accepted dates relating to the occupation of Australia by modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, appear to be in excess of 50,000 years1. Thus we have a paradox here: the "archaic" humans of Australia would appear to be younger than the "moderns". This is the enigma presented to us by Kow Swamp. Who were these people? What was their relationship, if any, to Homo erectus? One school of thought holds that they merely represent one end of a spectrum in the morphology of modern aboriginal people. Maybe. That did not seem to be the opinion of the palaeontologists who first described them. Times change. Perceptions accommodate to new realities. We don't really want to get into a political bun fight: go to the link below, download the images and just stand back and look at them. Modern?

Another, even more perplexing, question is - could any of them still be around? Hell, not around Kow Swamp, that's for sure, but ... somewhere? Is the story of Homo erectus and these mysterious archaics truly over? More on that below.

Results of wave action near the 1970's dig site With the help of Thorne's and others' articles1, we located the original dig sites without difficulty. The irrigation bank, below which one of the tool sites is located, has been greatly cut away by wave action. Many large logs have been thrown up on the shore. Obviously, the lake can present quite a different face from the placid aspect it showed us on our visit. Not surprising : the water is shallow and the surrounding country is flat, offering no protection from strong winds. This water body is deceptively tranquil, we'd say. A fishing excursion in a small boat could quickly turn deadly.

Microlith? Dimensions : 5cm x 1.5cm In 1975 Wright described excavations performed near the mouth of Taylor's Creek which yielded quartz artefacts in association with the "KS14" burial site. The area has since been greatly rearranged by wave action, exposing large numbers of quartz and granite stones. It was possible to triangulate the original TC 3/1 to TC 3/5 locations following Wright's directions.

Microlith? Dimensions : 5cm x 1.5cm Many stones had been revealed by wave action. To my untrained eye, the one shown here appeared to be have been artificially worked and possessed of a cutting edge. But whether this or any of the others represented a genuine microlith I'm not really qualified to judge. Besides, although Wright shows that the pieces were worked at the site, the question of whether they were worked by the same people who buried their dead there is less certain. That means we have no clear proof that Kow Swamp type people were in command of a lithic technology comparable to their "modern" counterparts who inhabited the same district.

Out of Africa?(See NOTE #1)

H. erectus, Z. Burian It is, I hope, a part of general knowledge that the first hominid to make it "out of Africa" was Homo erectus, the type specimen of which was collected in Java in the late 19th century. H. erectus remained a stable form for about a million years. The most recent known survivors held out till a mere 27,000 ybp in islands off the coast of Timor. About 200, 000 ybp, the Neandertals, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis appeared. They are supposed to have have arisen from H. erectus and formed a distinctive group specifically adapted to tolerate the harsh conditions of ice age Europe. The most recent known Neandertal remains date to about 28,000 ybp.

African Eve ... (See NOTE #1)

If the molecular biologists and the story told by our mitochondrial DNA by are to be believed, about 150,000 ybp, a very special woman lived somewhere in Africa. In her life she may have suffered trauma and heartbreak for all her people and all her people's children died. Well, so one possible scenario goes. But she, and at least some of her children did not die out. They lived on, they went forth from Africa and their descendants took possession the Earth. They are us, Homo sapiens sapiens, and that woman alone was the Mother of our race.

Thus it was that, a mere 30,000 ago, at least three separate species, as distinct from modern day races, of humanity inhabited the Earth. However by 10,000 ybp, at the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene epoch, only one kind of human remained : Homo sapiens sapiens, modestly the "double wise man" after ourselves.

By the beginning of the Holocene we had spread to all land masses on the planet, save for Antarctica, and, in a few places, were beginning to experiment with farming. What happened to those others, to our cousins left behind?

For, it seems to me, something truly extraordinary took place at the close of the Pleistocene. The great Ice Age ended, the glaciers melted, seas rose by hundreds of metres and flooded the land. Animals such as mammoths, sabre tooth tigers, diprotodons, the giants which are collectively called the Pleistocene Megafauna, almost all died. And quickly too. All continents felt the holocaust, some catastrophically, others less severely. In North America, the extirpation of the megafauna took place in less than 1000 years, a blink of an eye, geologically speaking. Perhaps even quicker, for the resolution of the fossil beds and C14 dates don't allow us to discriminate more finely.

It's held by some that our forebears out competed, out hunted, out fought and replaced the others, the primitive, slope-headed, beetle-browed, dim-witted ape-men and women who could not compete, who were unfit in the darkest Darwinian sense. The fact that our own direct ancestors are usually heroically portrayed as high browed, white Anglo-saxon types, if not Protestant then at least blond and Teutonic looking, is taken as a matter of course. Like Aylar and Jondalar in Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear novels. Agreeable flattery is regarded as only proper by self satisfied victors.

The Pleistocene Extinctions

But ... what if it's not true that we inherited the world because of our superiority? What if, instead of our agency, the extinction of the others, along with the megafauna, was due to a global climate catastrophe? In that case, we may owe our presence here, today, not to our having the right stuff but to mere good luck. To a few wanderers in the wilderness who, through pure chance, were spared and were able to outbreed the decimated remnants of the cousins.

Admittedly, inheriting the family estate because our brothers and sisters got hit by a truck is rather less flattering than the traditional hero-battling-mammoth scenario. Still, the sheer randomness of the survival stakes is put forward as a serious consideration by respected authorities on evolutionary theory such as S.J. Gould.

The problem of the lost megafauna is two hundred years old, the question of the ape men somewhat less, and the literature, by now, is BIG. I'm not about to contest the various arguments: the interested reader is referred to Quaternary Extinctions3. Suffice it to say, if was only a cosmic lucky dip that saw us prosper, then it's not true that the demise of the others was preordained. They may not have been "unfit" at all. Maybe even, heretical thought, it was a case of the relatively unfit who got lucky while the more deserving got the chop?

The Archaics ...

In palaeoanthropology there exists a loose end: a class of prehistoric people for whom no fancy Latin name has been assigned. They are a class who, by reason of their morphology, appear to stand somewhere between modern humans and H. erectus. And yet they are neither. Nor are they Neandertals. They are the archaics. (NOTE: The appellation Homo heidelbergensis has been gaining in popularity as an inclusive species name for archaic humans.)

The Multiregional Theory of human evolution holds that modern humans arose from H. erectus stock independently in various regions. These palaeontologists hold that the archaics represent a transitional form leading to the same result everywhere. Of course, this is patent nonsense : evolution simply doesn't work that way.

The Single Origin school holds that humans arose at a particular time and place and, from there, spread around the world. The theory draws strong support from studies of the human mitochondrion and has come to be better known as the Out of Africa theory. The molecular biologists claim to have genetic evidence that no interbreeding between modern humans and pre-existing populations of Homo took place as our kind spread to the Earth's four corners. That means the earlier humans must have been displaced and made extinct without issue.

Some palaeontologists, on the other hand, see traces in bones that genetic intermingling did occur. They see the archaics as part of such evidence. Although they adhere to the Single Origin Theory, they take the same artefacts as the Multiregionalists and draw diametrically opposite conclusions. But this is a road down which we shall go no further. See NOTE #1 below.

Hybrids?

H. erectus, Z. Burian Could not a few of the others have survived into more recent times? Actually, they were more than cousins, those H. erectus people: they were, in a sense, our parents. Some of them, after all, gave rise to us. Could we and they have interbred? Did some of our kind have children by some of their kind? Would not the fruit of such a union leave identifiable bones in testament? Are such hybrid bones to be found? Would we call such a being an archaic human?

Well, yes. Maybe. Possible hybrid remains are to be found in several places around the globe. One, not so well known, archaic 'homeland' appears to have been southern Australia. See my article in prep for the Cryptozoology Review for a list of references.

It is clear that, in comparatively recent times, Australia was inhabited by two distinct types of human, one modern looking, the other archaic. Moreover, it now appears more than possible that the Australian continent was colonised by both H. sapiens and H. erectus1.

Could the Australian mainland have seen the hybridisation of two species of Homo to produce the results we see at Kow Swamp and elsewhere?

Recently Living Archaic Humans?

More intriguingly, could any such people have lived on into comparatively recent times? The Kow Swamp remains date to about 13,000 - 9,000 ybp1. The ones from Willandra date to around 6,000 ybp. That's well into Holocene times. Are there any discoveries with a more recent date than these? Yes. There are.

In the 1970s a paper in a French language journal indicated that remains of "archaic" humans found in New Caledonia were a mere 300 years old. That is to say, it now appears there is documented evidence that archaic humans, of the type matching Kow Swamp and other specimens, lingered on into modern times. That is astounding.

The question must therefore be asked : if only three hundred years ago in New Caledonia, why not elsewhere? (I haven't heard how solid the C14 date is on this one yet. If any reader knows more, by all means speak?)

Obviously, the survival of "archaic" humans into the present day, possibly a separate species arisen from intermarriage of our own kind with H. erectus would be of extreme scientific interest. It would also carry the heaviest ethical burden in terms of our behaviour towards them, should they in fact be found still to exist.

H. erectus, Z. Burian OK, let's ask the fatal question. What are we to make of modern day legends of surviving hominins, tall tales of beings like the so-called "Big Foot", the "Almasti" and the "Yeti"? Could the Australian version, the so called "Yowie", have been a relict archaic human, stories about whom having been handed down over centuries to frighten small children around campfires late at night? Might we, more scientifically, have called such a being Homo heidelbergensis? (See NOTE #3 below.)

All we'll say is that a scenario like that, of archaics lingering on into near modern imes, is very, very unlikely. This side of the completely impossible, that is. But if Australia were once colonised by a pre-human race, before ever modern humans ventured into this island continent, they must have left traces. In the forbidding vastness of Australia's deserts, where should one look for such traces? As time and opportunity allows, the Quest may try to answer this puzzle.

Why trouble to write this up if it's all a load of utter nonsense? Well, I guess, you never know. Serendip. The Australian region is the only place in the world where scientifically attested remains of relatively recent date have been found which just might have something to say about the "late surviving hominin" hypothesis.

The idea outlined here provides the only (more or less!) workable mechanism whereby such a thing could come to pass. OK, it's a big leap in the dark, (almost) completely unfounded, scientifically dubious (extremely!) and (almost certainly!) utterly ridiculous. All this we know already so please don't bother to point it out.

But just remember this: if in the extremely unlikely event it ever turns out there really is something to the "late surviving hominin" legend - remember you read it first while on the Quest for Thylacoleo. Staking our claim, that's all.

NOTE, 2009:
The above was all written prior to the discovery of the "Hobbits", Homo floresiensis, on the island of Flores in the Republic of Indonesia. This discovery entirely changes the picture we have of late surviving hominins. We will write more on this pretty soon ...

Copyright © 2009 to D. Hynes. All rights reserved.

300 yo archaic humans?

l'Homme de Peu: un squellette "archaique" a Mare (Nouvelle Caledonie). M.J. Dubois, Bulletin de la Societe d'Etudes Historiques de Nouvelle Caledonie, 27, 1976, pp 34-36.

Click ARCHAIC.PDF for a scanned PDF (385K) of the article. Copyright is retained by the relevant authors and/or publishers.NOTE: My thanks to Michel Raynal for alerting me to this one. Translation coming!

NOTE #1 : When I get the time, and if anyone presses me, I may write up something about multi-regionalism vs Out of Africa. But, really, there's no need. Much has already been written so better leave it lie?

NOTE #2 : A book that definitely should be on your shelves is Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution, Paul S. Martin & Richard G. Klein, eds. University of Arizona Press, Tucson 1984.

NOTE #2A : One that I'd recommend for an overview of human evolution is The Fossil Trail by Ian Tattersall.

NOTE #3 : The name Homo heidelbergensis was, I think, proposed by the noted palaeoanthropologist Ian Tattersall as a catch-all species name for those hominids dating from after about 500 kybp who are neither H. sapiens, nor H. neanderthalensis nor H. erectus.

The trouble is that the term is then inclusive of beings who, in all likelihood, were the ancestors of modern H. sapiens, as well as others who assuredly were not. It is a group that shows a lot of variability for a single species. Rather too much some might say. There is also the time frame of half a million years to take account of.

For example, the Jebel Irhoud 1 cranium may well belong to an ancestral human. But what about utterly weird looking creatures such as the Petralona specimen? At a date of possibly 400 kyb, it can't belong in the sapiens line, if the Out-of-Africa school is correct, and it can't represent a hybrid between sapiens and erectus either. A line of erectus morphing into neanderthalensis maybe? Whatever the case, it's obvious that archaics dating from before, say, 150 kyb don't represent sapiens/erectus hybrids. If outside Africa they can only be be representatives of populations diverging from erectus stock. Diverging into what, though? Not modern sapiens, that's for sure.

On the other hand, what can we say about archaics who date from after the time when H. sapiens were in the world? Those who lived more recently than about 150 kyb that is?

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