Eden In The East: Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia [Paperback]

At the end of the Ice Age, Southeast Asia formed a continent twice the size of India. The South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand and the Java Sea, which were all dry, formed the connecting parts of the continent. Geologically, this half-sunken continent is the Sunda shelf of Sundaland. In Eden in the East Stephen Oppenheimer puts forward the astonishing argument that here in Southeast Asia was the cradle of civilisation that fertilised the great cultures of China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Crete six thousand years ago. He produces evidence from ethnography, archaeology, oceanography, from Creation stories, myths and sagas, and from linguistics and DNA analysis, to argue that this founder-civilisation was destroyed by the catastrophic flood, caused by a rapid rise in sea level at the end of the last Ice Age.

'Eden in the East'overturns conventional ideas of the origins of western civilization in Mesopotamia. In this book I place Southeast Asia for the first time as the key to the first roots of civilisation. At the same time I provide scientific explanations for numerous, and previously unexplained, cultural links between early Eastern and Western cultures. Notable among these links are the hundreds of myths of a great flood which forced people into boats and left only a few survivors. I can now identify this flood as the dramatic rise in sea level at the end of the ice age that suddenly inundated vast areas of Eurasia. In other words the Biblical Flood really did occur. It had its most disastrous effects, however, in the continent of Southeast Asia - now a lost and half-sunken Eden.

As the Ice Age ended, there were three catastrophic and rapid rises in sea level. The last of these, which finished shortly before the start of civilization in Mesopotamia, may have been the one that was remembered. These three floods drowned the coastal cultures and all the flat continental shelves of Southeast Asia. As the sea rolled in, there was a mass emigration from the sinking continent. These flood-driven refugees, carried their domestic animals with them in large ocean-going canoes in all directions. The networks of sea trade, created by their settlements around the Indian Ocean, fertilized the Neolithic cultures of China, India, Mesopotamia and Egypt.

The Southeast Asian contributions to the building of the first cities in Mesopotamia may not have been solely technological. While they may have brought the new ideas and skills of megalithic construction cereal domestication, sea-faring, astronomy, navigation, trade and commerce, they may also have introduced the tools to harness and control the labour of the farmers and artisans. These included magic, religion, and concepts of state, kingship and social hierarchy.

The evidence:

While most alternative prehistories are based more on speculation than fact, I have found some very solid evidence; and have built on the work of specialists in many fields in addition to my own research, to support a comprehensive new picture.

The most solid facts come from oceanographic research of the last decade. It now appears that the great rise in sea level after the last ice age, known about for many years, was not gradual; three sudden ice-melts, the last of which was only 8000 years ago, had catastrophic effects on tropical coasts with flat continental shelves. Rapid land loss was compounded by superwaves, set off by cracks in the earth s crust as the weight of ice shifted to the seas.

Archaeology holds the most accurately dated clues to the past. I have devoted two chapters to archaeological evidence found on coasts and in caves throughout the Indo-Pacific region. All of the technological 'firsts' which signalled man's emergence from the long Palaeolithic era towards the end of the Ice Age come from the Pacific Rim islands. These include evidence of deliberate long-distance sailing and grinding of cereal flour in the Solomon islands from 30,000 years ago. The world's first pots, 12,500 years old, come from Japan. The first evidence that swamps were drained for agriculture comes from the New Guinea Highlands 9,000 years ago.

These snapshots hint at a much older history to the discovery of Neolithic skills in the East. The better archaeological preservation of the later stages of human development in Mesopotamia and Egypt, however, has given rise to the view that civilization started in the West.

I review the evidence of the spoken word in the two linguistic chapters. Experts in the history of language now recognise that Southeast Asia not Europe or West Asia was the centre of language dispersal at the end of the Ice Age. The ancestral language of the Micronesians and Polynesians did not come out of China, as has been recently assumed, but further south over 8000 years ago out of the drowning islands of Indonesia. As the Flood engulfed Indo- China and separated Sumatra from Malaysia the ancestral languages of the Khmers, whose descendants built Angkor Wat, moved west into India.

The most dramatic new findings in this book come out of my own research field. I have published more than 25 scientific papers on the genetic prehistory of the Indo-Pacific region over the past 15 years. Building on my initial work, in Eden in the East I have shown that genetic disorders can be used as people-markers revealing a new view of prehistoric migrations in the Indo-Pacific region. My latest finding, made in collaboration with the Oxford Institute of Molecular Medicine, was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics in October 1998. This paper arose directly out of my research for Eden in the East. It provides compelling evidence that Polynesians and other argonauts of the Indian and Pacific Oceans originated in eastern Indonesia back in the Ice Age rather than in China, as previously thought. This finding alone forces the realisation that the Polynesians' skills of sailing, navigation, astronomy and agriculture had their origins, back in Indonesia, during the Ice Age.

Another objective tool that I use to explore ancient East-West cultural influence in the last part of the book is comparative mythology. Uniquely shared folklore shows that counterparts and originals for nearly every Middle Eastern and European mythological archetype, including the Flood, can be found in the islands of eastern Indonesia and the southwest Pacific. Southeast Asia is revealed as the original Garden of Eden and the Flood as the force which drove people from Paradise.

My multidisciplinary approach to prehistoric enquiry has been recognised in the academic fields of linguistics and comparative folklore. I have been invited to present papers on my work on prehistory at international linguistic meetings. This year I contributed a chapter to a book on Flood myths in the Moluccas published by the Department of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia and Oceania, Leiden University (Netherlands). --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

This astonishing book radica1ly changes our conventional view of prehistory by suggesting that: * The, biblical Flood really did occur. - at the end of the last Ice Age. * The Flood drowned for ever the continental shelf of Southeast Asia, and caused a population dispersal which fertilized the Neolithic cultures of China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. * The roots of the great flowering of civilization in the fertile crescent of the Ancient Near Fast therefore lie in the sinking shorelines of Southeast Asia. * The Polynesians did not come from China but from the islands of Southeast Asia. * The all-important start of rice-growing was not in China or India, but in the Malay Peninsula 9,000 years ago. * Tribes in eastern Indonesia hold the key to the mysterious passion cycles of most early Western religions. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Stephen Oppenheimer qualified in medicine from Oxford University in 1971. After qualifying, he followed a career in tropical paediatrics, and has spent most of the last twenty years working and travelling in the Far East and Pacific region. From 1990 to 1994 he was Professor of Paediatrics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Much of his research interest has been in malaria and the unique genetic mutations that protect against it. These mutations acting as markers hold some of the best evidence for the Indo-Pacific migrations that followed the flood at the end of the last ice age - and it was this kind of evidence that first persuaded him to seriously investigate the possibility of 'founder cultures' in Southeast Asia.

Stephen Oppenheimer is the author of many articles in medical and scientific journals, but Eden in the East is his first book for the general reader. He is married with two children and now lives in Oxford. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

from Introduction to Part 1

... Certain Neolithic skills - such as the cultivation of domestic rice - may have taken a long time to develop. Without archaeological evidence of the early stages, archaeologists might call the first appearance of the fully fledged skill an 'agricultural revolution'. If archaeological evidence of such early agricultural breakthroughs was unavailable in one region, but accessible elsewhere, a later date in the first area would imply that it had lagged behind, and was learnt from the other region. This seems to have been the case in East and Southeast Asia.

We would require a major catastrophe, which left little evidence of its passing, to produce such a regional void in the archaeological record. Three such catastrophes did happen, and affected the western rim of the Pacific more than anywhere else in the world. These were the rapid episodic ice-melts at the end of the ice age that led to three rises in sea level over low-lying continental shelves. Each was followed by apparent revolutions or cultural milestones.

This accelerated period of sea-level rise had three effects on the evidence of human activities. First, in Southeast Asia and China, where there is a flat continental shelf, any evidence of coastal and lowland settlements and technology before 8000 years ago was drowned forever. Second, during the third and final rise in sea level, water spread out widely on flat continental shelves, and did not start retreating until about 5500 years ago. Those coastal settlements dating from between 7500 to 5500 years ago that still remain above water are therefore now covered with a thick layer of silt. Third, the inhabitants of the flooded coastal settlements would have been forced to move, carrying any skills they had elsewhere.

These predictions are borne out in the strange chronology of the Neolithic revolution in Eurasia. The Pacific Rim countries seemed to start their revolution well before the West, but then apparently stopped. Around 12,500 years ago, not long after the first flood, pottery appeared for the first time in the world in southern Japan. Some 1500 years later there is evidence of pots being made in China and Indo-China. These examples of pottery making antedate any from Mesopotamia, India or the Mediterranean region by 2500-3500 years. Stones for grinding wild cereal grains appeared in the Solomon Islands of the Southwest Pacific as early as 26,000 years ago, whereas they were not apparently used in Upper Egypt and Nubia until about 14,000 years ago, and in Palestine some 12,000 years ago.

Around 11,000 years ago about the same time as the Chinese started making pots, sheep were first domesticated in northern Mesopotamia and einkorn wheat was harvested in Syria. Within a thousand years, fully domesticated wheat, barley and pulses were being cultivated in Jericho, and the fertile crescent of the Ancient Near East moved into an agricultural revolution that eventually spread the new domesticated crops and animals from Asia Minor (Turkey) to Iraq and on to Pakistan by 9000 years ago. Also around that time, the first farming village was built in Asia Minor and, finally, the first pots were made in the Near East, 3500 years later than in Japan. By 9000 years ago therefore, the Ancient Near East was well into its Neolithic Revolution.

In other scattered parts of the world people had also begun cultivating crops by 9000 years ago. Barley cultivation was developed in the Indus Valley, and root crops such as taro were grown in the Highlands of New Guinea. Incredibly for such an early date, the New Guinean Highlanders were already using ditches to drain swamps for crop- growing. By 9000 years ago, crop cultivation had also started in North, Central and South America. The explanations for the rapidity of this extraordinary worldwide revolution are meagre.

If the fertile crescent of the Near East is, for the sake of argument, taken as a model fast-track developer, the first records of making a pot - that durable artefact so loved by archaeologists - come just 1000 years after farming in the Near East. It is puzzling, then, that although the first pots, were made in Japan, China and Indo-China thousands of years before, rice was apparently not grown as a domestic crop anywhere in Asia until about 8000 years ago. Why is there this gap? There is certainly fragmentary evidence of a Neolithic lifestyle in East Asia, with a wide range of tools such as choppers, scrapers, awls and grinding stones, as well as pots, hearths and kitchen waste going back to a much earlier period. This Neolithic debris, however, tends to be scattered in inland caves.

Caves in both China and Southeast Asia have been the best, and often the only, sources of early remains. Was this the preferred place of habitation? Surely not all the Asians were troglodytes? What is missing in the early Neolithic record in East Asia is what past travellers saw and that we still see today - a thriving coastal culture with rice and other crops and intensive marine exploitation. This is absent, as is any other evidence of human activity. There is an almost total absence of open Neolithic sites in lowland areas dating from 10,000 to 5000 BC.

The situation in island Southeast Asia is even more bizarre. A decade ago, there was no archaeological evidence of rice-growing in Indonesia or East Malaysia older than 1500 years. This date is a thousand years after estimated dates for the introduction of bronze and iron artefacts to the same region. Prehistorians thus described island Southeast Asia, south of the Philippines, as moving into the Bronze and Iron Ages from the Stone Age before there was any local evidence of rice-growing. There is, however, exciting new evidence from Sakai Cave in southern Thailand suggesting that rice-growing started in Indo-China even before the last flood, and the skill could have been carried west to India. The present archaeological evidence of early agriculture in China and Southeast Asia may, therefore, give an incomplete story of its development. Because of coastal inundation, most evidence of earlier agriculture in the coastal areas is now likely to be deep under water. Supporting this is the observation that the earliest sites with evidence of agriculture in Asia are generally in inland and upland parts.

The result of this nearly-blank sheet in Southeast Asian Neolithic prehistory is that archaeological views have polarised. One side - the majority - sees the island Southeast Asian Neolithic period as starting only perhaps 4000 years ago, with migrants coming down from China through Taiwan and the Philippines. The other group, with whom I agree, argue that the ancestors of the people in Southeast Asia today were living there at the end of the ice age and not only developed their sailing and agricultural skills much earlier than people in the Near East, but started long distance sailing round Asia and the Pacific more than 7000 years ago. ... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.