Niah

Niah National Park was established in 1974 in northern Sarawak, in insular Malaysia, and protects some 31 km² around a limestone massif rising above the forested plain.

Its value is above all archaeological. In the Great Cave of Niah, the excavations begun by Tom Harrisson in the 1950s brought to light the so-called Deep Skull, the remains of an anatomically modern human dated to some forty thousand years ago, the oldest known in island South-East Asia. The site documents practically continuous occupation ever since, with burials, tools and animal remains that make it possible to reconstruct the evolution of the environment and of ways of life over tens of millennia. In the Painted Cave, rock paintings and the remains of boat-shaped coffins are preserved.

The caves also hold enormous colonies of edible-nest swiftlets and bats. The gathering of the nests, highly prized in Chinese cooking, has been practised for centuries using bamboo scaffolding that climbs tens of metres to the vaults, a regulated activity still in the hands of families with hereditary rights. At dusk comes the changeover between the millions of bats going out and the swiftlets coming back.