Doors open on tropical Eden
It’s official: the Garden of Eden is located in a remote corner
of Indonesia.
A team of scientists reported this week the discovery of dozens
of new species of animals in The Foja Mountains.
Doors open on tropical Eden
It’s official: the Garden of Eden is located in a remote corner of Indonesia.
A team of scientists reported this week the discovery of dozens of new species of animals in The Foja Mountains.
The place is so isolated that some of the animals showed no fear of humans.
Biologists were able to bend over and pick up two Long-Beaked Echidnas, primitive egg-laying mammals.
The 2 million-acre swath of the Foja Mountains is draped in old growth tropical forest. The range is located in the eastern Indonesian area of Papua.
Last December’s trek into this wilderness was organized by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences and Conservation International.
What they discovered was a place with no signs of past civilization, a trackless jungle without so much as a trail.
It was not just the terrain that challenged the team. Papua is the center of a decades-long separatist movement that has been responsible for an estimated 100,000 deaths. Foreign access is, as they say, tightly restricted.
Accompanying the group were headmen from two tribes, the Kwerba and Papasena, who are traditionally regarded as owners of the mountains. Even they were astounded at its remoteness. Neither believed clan members had ever visited the area.
The area’s isolation is rooted in its abundance. Only a handful of people live on the fringes of the area, and game in the foothills is so abundant that they had no reason to venture deeper into the mountains.
The group found butterflies, frogs and plants new to science. A bird, the Smoky Honeyeater – also made its debut. A mammal, the Golden-mantled Tree Kangaroo, is new to Indonesia and hunted to near extinction elsewhere.
As exciting as it is to read about these discoveries via a report from Associated Press, the news left me pondering.
Imagine devoting years to graduate study of, say, amphibians, and then landing in a place where the very animals that you’ve built your life around are still waiting for names.
Imagine knowing that your footsteps may be the very first laid down in a place.
But the lasting pleasure I took from the news of these discoveries is that in a time when people routinely pack hand-held toys that link to satellites to locate them within a circle of a few feet on this vast planet, when even space travel fails to elicit gasps, there are still empty places on the map.
Two hundred years ago, Lewis and Clark led an expedition of discovery into the West. There were people who, having studied fossils, wondered if the explorers might encounter live dinosaurs. There were whole mountain ranges that lay ahead, unknown to anyone of European descent.
A century later, there were still many empty spots on maps of the world. It’s been during the last 100 years that we steadily colored those places in with new knowledge.
Still, surprises occur. A small parrot was discovered in the South American cloud forest not too many years ago.
Even in California, new insects crop up with regularity.
The last, vast wilderness is the deep sea, and even that is no barrier to the eye of mankind now.
It’s likely that our generation or the next will color in the last empty spots on that global map, and the world will be a better documented, but much smaller place.
I will miss those empty spots.
