Mythologies of the Punan Batu Tribe

The Punan Batu tribe, the last jungle tribe on the island of Borneo that is still active in hunting and gathering activities in the forest, has an interesting uniqueness. Based on the results of genetic tests, the DNA of this tribe was found to be older than the ancestors of the Indonesians. This is reinforced by the use of ancient languages that are still preserved in their rituals. Previously, the existence of hunter and gatherer tribes such as the Punan Batu Tribe was considered a myth by many researchers. However, a genetic study that took DNA samples of Dayak tribes from various provinces on the island of Borneo revealed an interesting fact. A few years ago, researchers were surprised to find DNA that was thought to be quite ancient and had not undergone mixing or assimilation with other groups. The findings raise many questions about how a community can survive without cultural interaction or exchange for thousands of years. In addition, the study also raises questions about the lifestyle and how exclusive the tribe's living space is. The researchers finally arrived at the Punan Batu Tribe community in Tanjung Palas District, Bulungan Regency, North Kalimantan, located in a karst area stretching from East Kalimantan to North Kalimantan. They managed to uncover the fact that this community is still actively living ancestral lifestyles, such as hunting, gathering, moving, and living under burrows or niches. "We are witnessing a community that is still living the lifestyle of its ancestors today. Hunting, gathering, moving around and living under burrows or niches," said Pradiptajati Kusuma, a researcher from the Mochtar Riyadi Institute.

Bulungan. In the interior of North Kalimantan Province, there still exists a forest tribe that truly lives within the jungle. This tribe is dubbed the last hunters and gatherers of Kalimantan. Its name is the Punan Batu Benau Community, a small group living along the upper banks of the Sajau River and the surrounding forests of Mount Benau, precisely in Neighborhood Unit 11, Sajau Village, Tanjung Palas District, Bulungan Regency, North Kalimantan Province. They inhabit cave dwellings scattered throughout the Mount Benau forest. The community consists of 35 households with a total of 106 people. From birth until old age, they have spent their lives entirely in the forest. This community still relies on ancestral traditions to utilize forest resources. Almost every aspect of their lives depends on the forest’s existence. They do not recognize permanent houses as dwellings. When leaving their caves, they only build huts made of bamboo with tarpaulin roofs, usually along the Sajau River. Their daily life consists of roaming the Mount Benau forest in search of food sources. They gather various foods and medicines from nature. As for modern medicine, the only one they know is Bodrex (a common painkiller). In terms of education, they have never attended school, learning only from ancestral wisdom passed down orally. This community truly lives differently from mainstream society. They only know how to survive in the forest and refuse to engage with the outside world. For them, the forest is not merely a place to find food but also a fortress of identity and a cultural space. From the forest, they obtain tubers, honey, forest products, and hunted animals. In the past, the forest also provided economic resources such as agarwood, balam wood, and swiftlet nests, which they sold to the heirs of Sultan Maulana Bulungan. But now, the situation has changed drastically.

And so in 2018, when Stephen Lansing, an anthropologist at the Santa Fe Institute, and Pradiptajati Kusuma, a geneticist at the Mochtar Riady Institute for Nanotechnology in Tangerang, Indonesia, said they had learned of a clan of about 30 Punan families who sheltered in limestone caves and rarely, if ever, emerged from the forest, many experts were skeptical. But with funding from the National Science Foundation, the scientists made contact with the nomadic group in 2018, and began collecting data with the aim of ensuring their health and welfare. After that first trip, Dr. Lansing returned to Santa Fe with photographs of a man wearing a loincloth made of bark fiber, along with recordings of a song language he believed resembled no other. His initial description of these people, who call themselves the Cave Punan or Punan Batu, was published last year in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences. Press reports in the Indonesian media catalyzed the local government to declare the Punan Batu as regular users of their forest, a first step toward obtaining the right to manage it under national laws. Some experts remain doubtful that this unusual group could really have been secluded for so long. The skeptics have compared the announcement to that of the Tasaday, a “lost tribe” discovered in the Philippines in 1971, whose isolation was eventually determined to be an exaggeration, if not a hoax. Bernard Sellato, a Punan specialist with the French National Center for Scientific Research, has been particularly fierce in his criticism. In an email, he referred to the Punan Batu and other coastal groups as “‘fake’ Punan.” Based on historical accounts and ethnographies, he remains convinced their ancestors were not native to the island, but rather enslaved people imported from New Guinea and eastern Indonesia several centuries ago. But a new study focusing on the DNA of the Punan Batu, recently accepted by a scientific journal, is poised to eliminate the doubts of all but the most hardened critics. Based on the limited diversity revealed in the genes of the Punan Batu, they appear to have been isolated for more than 20 generations. Dr. Sellato’s contention that the Punan Batu are the descendants of imported slaves does not fit with these results. Halfway up the mountain was a cavern as large as an amphitheater. The cave, which contained a dense concentration of swiftlet nests, is a sacred site for the Punan, who consider it the source of all things. Once inside, a man named Ma’ruf took a seat on the dirt floor. He was in his early forties but appeared to be half that age, with swooped-over bangs and the youthful skin that comes from a life lived in the shade.

Theories of early cooperation in human society often draw from a small sample of ethnographic studies of surviving populations of hunter-gatherers, most of which are now sedentary. Borneo hunter-gatherers (Punan, Penan) have seldom figured in comparative research because of a decades-old controversy about whether they are the descendants of farmers who adopted a hunting and gathering way of life. In 2018 we began an ethnographic study of a group of still-nomadic hunter-gatherers who call themselves Punan Batu (Cave Punan). To investigate their ancestry and relationship to one another and neighboring groups, we combined multiple independent lines of evidence from ethnology, population genetics and linguistic analysis to provide the first comprehensive cultural-genetic-linguistic study of the only known group of Punan hunter-gatherers who remain continuously mobile. Scientific questions to be investigated follow from the discovery that the Punan Batu possess a unique ancestral genetic signature and form a genetic cluster distinct from neighboring tribal peoples of Borneo. Their divergent status over multiple independent genetic analyses, indicates that the Punan Batu have long been genetically seperate from nearby agriculturalists, and have experienced substantial genetic drift likely due to a combination of cultural endogamy and long-term genetic isolation. Estimating the genetic ancestry of individual people using ADMIXTURE reveals a single unique Punan-specific ancestral component. The Punan Batu also show long intra-population IBD segments and long runs of homozygosity (ROH), both consistent with long-term isolation. In combination this unique ancestral genetic signature of the Punan Batu, and their divergent status over multiple independent genetic analyses, indicates that the Punan Batu have long been genetically seperate from nearby agriculturalists, and have experienced substantial genetic drift likely due to a combination of cultural endogamy and long-term genetic isolation. Evidence from language is consistent with these inferences. The everyday spoken language of the Punan Batu is Punan Sajau, a Central Sarawakan Austronesian language which is related to those of their close neighbors. But some are also fluent in a hitherto undocumented language which is not spoken, but rather sung, customarily at night in the rock shelters or caves. This song language, Latala or Menirak (‘to sing’ in the daily Punan language), is known only to the Punan Batu, though it shares some formal features with other ritual song languages of Borneo. An internal subgrouping of Punan dialects recognizes a primary split between Punan Sajau, Tubu and Bah (the closest Punan neighbors of the Punan Batu and the other Punan groups. Thus, the retention of a divergent song language by the Punan Batu is most parsimoniously explained as an ancient cultural inheritance, which is consistent with the genetic evidence for prolonged isolation.