Ecology of Sulawesi. Tony Whitten

      Figure 1.37. Locations where megaliths are found in Central Sulawesi.

      After Kaudern 1938

      Near ports or other centres, rapid cultural changes occurred perhaps 1000 years before they occurred in remote tribal areas. If prehistory is taken as referring to that period before events and thoughts are written down, then there are still groups of people in remote areas of Sulawesi who live in prehistory. The official number of these tribal people in South Sulawesi is 60,000 (e.g., the Sareung, Bentong and Towala), in Central Sulawesi 50,500 (e.g., the Tolare, Towana and Sea-sea), in North Sulawesi 10,000 (e.g., the Gorontalo), and in Southeast Sulawesi 5,800 (e.g., the Tolaki, Tooere and Koro), but only a very small proportion of these are beyond the influence of government institutions. The major trends in dealing with these people are to teach and to develop, and little or no effort is made to learn from them. They hold within their cultures more information about their various environments and about forest products (drugs, rotan, semi-domestic crops, etc.) than could be gleaned in a decade of research, yet this knowledge is being lost to Indonesia and the rest of the world. The only in-depth study of a tribal group in Sulawesi seems to have been on the Towana of the eastern peninsula (Atkinson 1979, 1985), but this concerned their sociology rather than their ecology.

      Impacts of Prehistoric Man

      The activities of primitive man probably affected populations of animals and plants in four ways (Rambo 1979). First, he exerted direct selection on the species of prey he hunted. In many areas of the world early man has been implicated in the extinction of the giant members of the Pleistocene fauna (these were either absolutely large or large by comparison with living relatives). In Sulawesi, this 'mega-fauna' was represented by at least Heekeren's giant pig, the giant tortoise and the stegodont (p. 34). Both giant tortoises and elephant-like animals have suffered greatly from man and these used to be found in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia. The cause of their extinction is not known but if man were present when these animals roamed Sulawesi's forests (a situation which has yet to be confirmed) no evidence has been found in cave or other deposits. There is no evidence that prehistoric man had any greater effect than causing local extinctions, probably more as a result of forest clearance than overhunting. The only animals known from cave deposits in South Sulawesi which have not been recorded in historic times are two endemic rats, one of which is known from just two specimens collected in Central Sulawesi in the early 1900s. The absence of records from South Sulawesi is probably partly a result of the very small area of lowland forest remaining (p. 98) and partly because there have been no serious studies of small mammals in the province (Musser 1984).

      The relative numbers of the different animal species found in the cave deposits cannot be used to judge whether the Toalian hunters were selective or whether they simply caught and ate anything they could catch. This is largely because the excavations made before the war were not done with the rigorous techniques used in recent years and it is likely that only a proportion of the large bones were collected and many of the smaller fragments were overlooked. Many deposits have also since been mined for phosphate fertilizer (p. 553).

      The earliest Australoid people would have used spears and cord snares or set traps of camouflaged pits to catch their prey, and the large ground-living species such as pigs, anoa and babirusa were, not surprisingly, the most common prey. Even with the skill and knowledge of a forest-bred hunter it would be scarcely possible to cause anything but local reduction in numbers. They would, however, have produced fear and avoidance responses in their prey. Fear and avoidance of man is a learned trait: the Tasaday, a 28-member tribe in the forests of Mindanao who had had no known contact with other humans before 1962, were able to approach deer, which they did not hunt, and to stroke them (Nance 1975). In the absence of feline predators (such as tigers, clouded leopards and jungle cats), or large eagles, man as a predator would have been a novel component of the ecosystem. The monkeys and pigs may have responded by forming large social groupings because the more eyes and ears a group has the more likely it is that a predator will be detected (van Shaik 1983). Squirrels and birds may have developed more cryptic behaviour.

      Second, he dispersed trees by picking fruits in one place and discarding or voiding them in another. An early form of agriculture would have been the accidental or deliberate sowing of tree seeds in the same area, thereby reducing the distance between fruit trees. This phenomenon can frequently be seen at traditional resting places such as ridge tops or along forest paths, where rambutan, durian and other fruit trees can often be found.

      Third, when he was able to fell trees, he modified habitats. The long sequences of remains from Talaud and Maros are exceptional, however, in the almost total absence of ground stone axes and adzes. They do appear in the Kalumpang deposits but these date from rather later. So, not only were these tools possibly not part of the tool-kits of the Australoid people but the immigrant Austronesians (or the culture they introduced) apparently did not use them either.³⁶ It is possible to conclude then that the activities of the early horticulturalists in Sulawesi did not involve large-scale forest clearance and cultivation probably took place in small fixed plots next to their dwellings (Bellwood 1980a, 1985). It was probably iron, introduced about 1,500 years ago, rather than stone axes that gave man an efficient means of felling trees and it was probably at about that time that the process of forest clearance truly began. Some of the indigenous wildlife, such as the endemic pig, may have benefitted from the greater areas of relatively succulent secondary growth in the 'edge habitats', but this would also have exposed them to greater hunting pressure. There is evidence of forest clearance from about 9,000 years ago in New Guinea, and about 4,000 to 7,500 years ago in Sumatra.

      Fourth, he carried crops, pets/live foods and pests with him on his travels. Among his crops would have been plants whose edible parts were also the regenerative parts, such as yams³⁷ and tubers. Prehistoric man almost undoubtedly introduced the deer Cervus timorensis, common palm civet Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, Malay civet Viverra tangalunga, Prevost's squirrel Callosciurus prevostii, some of the rats, and jungle fowl or wild chicken Callus gallus, as well as the later domesticated animals such as buffaloes, dogs, horses, ducks, etc.

      Prehistoric man on Sulawesi had the distinction of having brought into domestication the endemic pig Sus celebensis some time in the early Holocene. This pig accompanied early adventurers or was traded, and morphological analyses of skulls show that Sulawesi pigs are still found in a domestic or feral state in Maluku, Flores, Timor and, amazingly, Simeulue, an island off the west coast of Aceh in northern Sumatra. Unlikely though this may seem, it is of great interest that the Simeulue language is said to be closest to a Bugis-type language! The only other pig brought into domestication was the common wild pig Sus scrofa which was apparently superior to Sus celebensis which it replaced, ousted, or with which it hybridized (Groves 1981).

      History

      It was in the 13th to 15th centuries that the famous Bugis kingdoms of Bone, Wajo and Soppeng, and the Makassarese kingdom of Gowa arose. During this period the power of the largely Buddhist empire of Srivijaya in