The first recorded human presence on the human journey was in the Indian Ocean, a region with warm waters and rich coastal forests. Starting with the “Migration out of Africa” around 70,000 years ago, within 20,000 years Homo sapiens had reached the farthest shores of this vast tropical ocean and colonised the farthest reaches of the Australian continent. However, this is only the best known and simplest route of our ancestors' migration.
Despite being an island nation, the oldest record of human fossils in South Asia comes from Sri Lanka. Why, even in today's high-tech age, do the oldest fossils in this vast region come from an island nation? It remains unclear whether this indicates that sailors from Africa first settled the island and then their cousins roamed Asia and made the overland route.
Perhaps it doesn't really matter in the end if the origins of human settlement on Lanka will forever remain a mystery and this piece of the puzzle will remain forever buried under the red laterite soil and fine sand of the ocean floor. But to give a quick idea of where and when the Mayuranga emerged, I will try to draw a basic timeline to understand how humans arrived on Lanka.
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Anthropologists have long maintained that the oldest fossils of early modern humans were found on the African continent, dating back 2.8 million years.* In the 1960s, the work of anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey in Tanzania rekindled the long-held belief that Africa was indeed the birthplace of humankind. Having been fascinated as a child by photos in a now-defunct Life magazine, I finally made the pilgrimage to visit the birthplace and gaze upon the famous traces of indelible footprints in the ancient mud of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. In that dusty landscape, it was easy to imagine our earliest ancestors walking upright in the sparse shade of Olduvai's acacia forests more than 2 million years ago. However, fossilized human remains have since been discovered in several locations around the world that have undermined the credibility of the “African origins theory.”
Asia's mainland and islands in the waters between the Indian and Pacific oceans have unearthed early human fossils older than most of those found in Africa. Homo fossils found in Longgu Cave in central China date to 2.48 million years ago, making them the second oldest record of human ancestors to date. But in the Siwalik Hills, rippling in front of the Himalayas, analysis of early bovine bone fragments dated to 2.588 million years ago revealed cut marks that can only be attributed to hominin activity. These discoveries distort established datelines for human evolution and raise questions about whether the first shambling steps of the earliest humans could have taken place exclusively in Africa.
Little is known about the progress of humankind before the catastrophic eruption of the Toba supervolcano in the Indonesian archipelago 74,000 years ago. For about 100,000 years prior to the supervolcano's eruption, fossil remains indicate the presence of a fire-using human species, from the first human appearances, that continues to evolve and struggle to dominate its fellow inhabitants on Earth. When the Toba volcano slammed into the Indonesian archipelago, it created a huge ash cloud that blocked out the sun's light and heat, resulting in a volcanic winter that lasted 10 years. *The long, harsh winter was followed by 1000 years of abnormally cold temperatures around the world. That dark, cold period is what we know as the Ice Age.
Many plant and animal species that survived the Toba eruption would have succumbed to the prolonged winter. In this barren landscape of the Earth, our species would have been pushed to the brink of extinction. In that harsh and endless cold, small tribes would have sought refuge in areas with the most tolerable climate, where plants also survived, facilitating the collection of limited food sources.
Analysis of deep soil samples from East Africa reveals that humans lived in equatorial coastal caves during the Ice Age. At the height of Earth's last ice age, bands of humans struggling to survive the cold followed migrating herds of animals and flocks of birds, as well as other predators. Leaving fossil traces behind, they migrated north through Africa to northeastern Ethiopia. Archaeological evidence proves that our early ancestors reached the shores of Bab el-Mandeb, along the coast of what is now Djibouti and Eritrea. Known as the “Gate of Tears” (“bab” means “gate” and “mandeb” means “lament” or “grief”), legend claims that the waters of this narrow strait of Bab el-Mandeb are tears shed for all the souls lost when Asia and Africa were torn apart.
This excerpt from Ravana's Lanka: The Landscape of a Lost Kingdom by Sunela Jayewardene is published with permission from Penguin Random House India.
