Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 20 April 2015 issue)

Dear Kam,
I’m bored. Is there anywhere interesting to visit?
Needing Excitement

Do you know anything about Lenggong? It’s a town and a valley about 45 minutes north of Kuala Kangsar in Perak. You’ve probably never heard of it, and until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t either, even though my family is from Kuala Kangsar. The Lenggong Valley is a Unesco World Heritage site, one of only five in Malaysia along with George Town, Melaka, the Mulu Caves and Mount Kinabalu. Lenggong is easily the least well known despite being the home of Perak Man, or perhaps because it is the home of Perak Man. When my wife discovered Lenggong on the internet, we decided to make a trip to visit Perak Man, and some other deceased Perak men. It was a trip into a very deep past.

The Lenggong Valley is attractive and quiet with the usual mix of oil palm estates on the valley sides and with forests above, and at the bottom, winds the Perak River. About 1.8 million years ago, a meteorite crashed to earth and blocked the river to create a large lake that has since drained away. The ancient lake became rich with freshwater shellfish and fish and around this lake lived ancient people who ate the abundant food, fashioned stone tools and buried their dead in the caves above. And this is why the Lenggong Valley is a Unesco World Heritage site: because archaeological digs conducted by Universiti Sains Malaysia have found evidence of 200,000 years of almost unbroken human habitation, which makes the site unique outside Africa (the Unesco website says nearly two million years of human habitation, but that doesn’t sound quite right).

Archaeologists studying prehistoric humans often find a site where people lived for, at most, a few hundred years before abandoning, or even only visited once when hunting, but at Lenggong, the archaeologists have discovered something truly remarkable: 200,000 years of unbroken human habitation. Well, not entirely unbroken because about 75,000 years ago, there was the Toba eruption in Sumatra, which is probably the biggest volcanic explosion in earth’s history, and which wiped out life for thousands of miles, as far away as India. The people living in Lenggong would have heard a massive explosion and then day would have turned to night as the sky became thick with the debris of an entire mountain. The archaeological record begins again 17,000 years later, probably with people from somewhere else. Archaeologists found in one of the caves an almost complete skeleton and they called him Perak Man. He’s dated to have been buried 11,000 years ago and he lived to the ripe old age of 40, in an age when life expectancy would have been 25. He managed to live so long despite having a disease that left him with a withered arm but he must have been a respected elder because surrounding his body were offerings of stones and several animal remains.

I’ve been fascinated by truly ancient prehistory ever since I read a book called The History of the World. It started telling the story of human existence right from the very beginning, from early humans in Africa and their (our) gradual spread across the world. As I continued reading the book and as was reading about the Renaissance or warring states in China, I remained aware of the early stage and that human history is a continuing story that flows on and on. So, when I heard about Lenggong Valley, Perak Man and the museum, I rushed to visit.

We arrived at the museum on a Saturday afternoon. It is quite far from the caves where the artifacts were found and is sited at what would have once been the bottom of the ancient lake. The man behind the front desk looked very pleased to see me. At first, he thought I was a foreigner and he looked high and low for the foreigners’ visitor book, which he couldn’t find. I signed the locals’ book and saw that despite this being a Saturday, there had hardly been 10 visitors that day. It is a Malaysian museum, which means, you know, well, it’s a Malaysian museum. It’s better than most, but it’s a confusing experience. This is probably hardly surprising because it’s difficult to tell the story of 200,000 years of unbroken, anonymous and seemingly unchanging life. How is this stone tool different from that stone tool from 100,000 years later, and what does it all mean? These are the artifacts and remains of today’s Orang Asli, so what do I care? I can’t recommend visiting the museum as an overwhelming sensory experience, unless you enjoy pressing buttons for exhibits that don’t work, and the bones of Perak Man himself are not (to my mind) respectfully presented, but it meant something to me. It is possible that I am a descendant of this ancient Perak Man.

Visiting Lenggong meant that I could also visit Kuala Kangsar and the graves of my father, my grandparents and other ancestors, of whom I am only dimly aware. I grew up in England but I always had a romantic and, no doubt, deluded awareness of myself coming from Malaysia and a place called Perak because in a graveyard out there lay my father and he was a Perak man. The story goes that his forebears were Bugis and upon arriving in Kuala Kangsar, they, no doubt, married local women, and long, long before that, who knows what intermingling happened, but people don’t like to talk about that possibility. I’ve visited my father’s grave many times and have always had different news to tell him, but it was the first time I had visited my grandfather’s grave because I didn’t know where it was until recently. I have no memories of my grandfather and only know him from photographs of him proudly wearing the splendid white uniform of a colonial civil servant. He looks like something from an unrecognisably distant past, and yet it wasn’t that long ago. It was good to finally meet him.

I wish I could draw some conclusion from my trip into a deep and not quite so deep past in Lenggong and Kuala Kangsar. I enjoyed visiting my Perak men, but I remain who I am and they will always be who they were. But standing at what was once the bottom of an ancient lake and trying to imagine what the landscape was like thousands of years ago did remind me that a random event like a meteorite, a volcano eruption or a car crash can change everything for eternity. And yet it is never an eternity. The Perak River keeps flowing.

Reprinted with the kind permission of