p Geologically speaking, the seas fringing the Asian continent—the Sea of Okhotsk, the Yellow Sea, the Sea of Japan, the Bering Sea and the Pacific—acquired their present contours only a short time ago. Land was subsiding and new volcanic islands and submarine mountains were rising out of the water there only 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. It is quite possible that the first men to reach Japan arrived there by land, not by sea.

p “Language archeology" tells us that the Japanese language consists of two layers, as it were. The oldest layer indicates a kinship with the languages of the Asian continent. (Like the languages of the Koreans, Tunguses, Turks and Manchurians the Japanese language has a welldeveloped system of suffixes and postpositions.) The second layer points to links with the languages of Indonesia and Oceania. (In Japanese, as in most of the languages of Oceania, two consonants cannot stand side by side in a word.) Many 100 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1974/RTO267/20070823/199.tx" Japanese words are similar to Oceanic words. Since these usually denote things and concepts connected with the sea they may have been adopted during trade and cultural contacts. Communities of "maritime peoples" may have existed on the coasts of the Japanese islands, particularly the southern islands. But they were not the first men to settle in the Land of the Rising Sun. Archeologists have shown that Japan’s oldest civilisation was a land-based culture, known as the “jomon”. Anthropologists connect this civilisation with the Ainus, who once inhabited Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands as well as the Japanese Archipelago.

p The Ainus were for a long time a’major mystery to anthropologists, who placed them in all three of the big races, the European, Mongoloid and Negroid. Soviet scholars have put forward impressive evidence that the Ainus were related to the aborigines of Australia and the other darkskinned peoples forming the "Oceanic branch" of the big Negroid race. The Ainus are poor mariners. In all likelihood they came to Japan in remote antiquity, using now vanished islets and land areas as bridges. The early inhabitants must have witnessed the destruction of old islands and the birth of new islands in the Sea of Japan. South of Tokyo Bay there are several islands from two to ten kilometres in diameter which were formed by young volcanoes. Not long ago the remains of a man of the Neolithic Age were discovered on Oshima, the island closest to Tokyo. Several thousand years ago men roamed the slopes of a volcano. Then the central part of the volcano collapsed and formed a caldera, a crater, within which a new cone later grew. Man was witness to all these changes.

p The Japanese islands were created, say geologists and oceanographers, by volcanic eruptions alternating with the rise and subsidence of the oceanic floor as a whole. The cataclysms that cause so much damage in Japan in our time are evidence that the earth’s crust in this area is still intensely active. The submarine canyons, such as the canyon in Tokyo Bay which extends almost 20 kilometres, show that many of Japan’s islands used to be much larger. A study of Japanese myths that go back into remote antiquity, plus underwater archeological research, will tell us to what extent the peopling of Japan and the rise of its prehistoric culture were connected with the unceasing activity of the earth’s crust, with the subsidence of tracts of land and the birth of new islands in the sea.

p China’s oldest myths tell of a war between the god of fire and the god of water "at the beginning of the world”. The mountains erupted fire, the earth quaked and the sea attacked the land. When the fire god was defeated he decided to commit suicide and struck his head against the highest mountain in the west. The frightful blow drove the land into the sea in the east like the prow of a boat, while in the west it flew into the air like a" boat’s stern. Since then all the rivers in China have flowed eastwards.

p “Geological, geophysical, paleontological, archeological and anthropological studies have shown,” says the Soviet scholar Yuri Reshetov, "that up until at least the middle of the last Ice Age the Japanese islands and Indonesia were Asian peninsulas. During the second half of the Ice Age (from 40,000 to 20,000 years ago), vast areas of land subsided into the sea and were replaced by what are the Sea of Japan and the 102 South China Sea. The sinking was accompanied by powerful volcanism and by earthquakes. At about the same time, that is, towards the end of the Ice Age, the ranges of Indo-China and the mountains of Central Asia rose another 2,000 metres. Many generations of Chinese must have witnessed the gigantic geological changes in SonthEast Asia. It is these events that the myths about the struggle between the gods of fire and water evidently reflect.”

p If Indonesia was a peninsula 20,000 years ago, Us division into separate islands took place at a later period. On the Sunda shelf lying between Java and Borneo, on the one hand, and the Malay Peninsula, on the other, there are sunken river valleys at a shallow depth; they have a ramified system of tributaries, like the veins of a leaf. These submerged valleys resemble ordinary river systems. They are not the work of the tides. Therefore, we must conclude that land sank here not so long ago.

p It was discovered in the nineteen twenties that the river valleys on Sumatra and other Indonesian islands continue into the shallow Sunda Sea, forming a completely submerged river system. This system of "underwater rivers" flows into the South China Sea, between the Great Natuna and South Natuna islands (Burugan Islands). The river valleys sank not so long ago, from the viewpoint of geology and oceanography. This took place well within human times, after man had settled his planet and reached a definite level of civilisation.

p Some Indonesian islands are no more than a few thousand years old. Immense geological processes are still taking place there; they are among the “hottest” spots on earth. The monstrous eruption 103 of the Krakatoa volcano in the last century (the repercussions were felt 4,000 kilometres away!) is Hie best known but far from the only manifestation of volcanism in Indonesia, and perhaps not the strongest. Indonesia has 128 volcanoes, many of them still active.

p A new volcano, named Tamboro, appeared on the Island of Sumbawa in 1812. Three years later, after the volcano had grown to 4,000 metres (!), it erupted, turning 100 cubic kilometres of rock into red-hot stones, dust, sand and ashes that buried almost 100,000 people, says the wellknown French volcanologist Haroun Tazieff in his book Le rendez-vousdu diable. The colossal explosion reduced the height of the volcano from 4,000 to 2,850 metres.

p According to Tazieff, Bromo on Java is one of the most active and probably one of the most destructive volcanoes in the world. It steams constantly and erupts on an average of once in two years. The volcano in the middle of Java, Mt Merapi, meaning "place of fire”, is among the greatest fire-breathing mountains on earth. The first recorded eruption of Merapi took place in the year 1006. The ashes covered a magnificent Buddhist temple, the Borobudur, and killed thousands of people.

p Javanese chronicles tell the story of the disaster. But think of how many cataclysms took place before events were recorded in writing! And how much more grandiose were the processes that took place in the turbulent period we call the end of the last Ice Age!

p The Island of Bali, situated next to Java, has the best preserved traces of an ancient culture that combines features of the local Indonesian civilisation with those of a civilisation brought 104 from India more than 2,000 years ago. According to local legends, Bali was once a flat, barren island. Then the gods abandoned neighbouring Java after the “faithless” appeared there, and moved to Bali. To make it into a place fit for themselves to live in, they created mountains on the island.

p The mountains on Bali are indeed young. Volcanoes were active there in the past and are still active today. Do Bali legends go back to the remote time when the island really had no volcanoes? Or did the cataclysms give rise to the myth of the gods moving to Bali? The myth was propaganda, of course. The “faithless” were the Moslems who, in the Middle Ages, seized Java and many other Indonesian islands, supplanting Hinduism and the local pagan cults.

p Folklorists may be able to answer this question, but they will probably need the help of geologists, oceanographers, and volcanologists. It is now clear that archeologists and anthropologists cannot study the ancient history of the peopling of the Indonesian archipelago without using data provided by other earth sciences. Man began to settle on these islands at a period so remote that by comparison the last Ice Age is a recent event. (The last Ice Age ended between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, while man as we know him appeared all of 40,000 years ago.)

p The earth sciences may clarify a problem which archeologists, philologists and ethnographers have been trying to solve for a good 150 years. The problem is: where did the Austronesian peoples inhabiting the islands and islets scattered throughout the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean as well, come from?

p In the last century philologists discovered a remarkable similarity among the languages spoken over the vast area that extends from Madagascar, near the shores of Africa, to Easter Island in the eastern part of the Pacific. It has now been demonstrated that tho similarity is not accidental. The languages spoken on Madagascar and on Easter Island which, along with those of the Hawaiians, Maoris and other inhabitants of Polynesia, belong to the Polynesian group, the languages of the Micronesians, living on islands in the North-West Pacific, those of the Melanesians, inhabiting islands in the SouthWest Pacific, the languages of the Indonesian Archipelago, and those of the indigenous population of Taiwan all come from a single root and constitute the Austronesian (“southern islands”) family of languages. Where the Austronesian languages originated is not yet certain. Some scholars say New Guinea, some say South China, and some say India, but Indonesia seems to be the most likely place.

p What drove the Austronesians to set out on distant voyages across two oceans: the Indian Ocean to Madagascar and the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island? It is impossible to say. But it would not be too bold to assume that it was the submersion of land in the area of Indonesia and the destruction of the hypothetical Austronesian Land. Just remember how young that region is geologically, as the gigantic eruption of Krakatoa so loudly proclaimed.

p Sunda Land is what geologists call the paleogeographic land mass that once united the northern islands of the Indonesian Archipelago up to Bali, part of the Philippines and perhaps 106 Japan and Sakhalin. Its final destruction took place from 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

p Traces of man in Indonesia are much older than that. A skeleton 40,000 years old has been found on the Island of Borneo. It well may be, in fact, that this area was the cradle of the human race.

Exploration of the floor of the shallow seas and straits of Indonesia may be able to tell us how the subsidence of land and the birth of new islands in Indonesia affected the destiny of man from the period of Pithecanthropus to the dispersion of the Austronesians.