The Niah Caves of Borneo Join the World Heritage List
UNESCO inscribed the caves of Niah National Park in Sarawak on 27 July 2024. People have used them for at least 40,000 years, and still climb their walls to gather swiftlet nests.
UNESCO added the caves of Niah to the World Heritage list on 27 July 2024, under the title The Archaeological Heritage of Niah National Park’s Caves Complex. The park is in the Miri division of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo, a short distance inland from the coast of the South China Sea.
Forty thousand years
The caves lie in a limestone massif that rises out of lowland rainforest. The main one, the Great Cave, has a mouth about 150 metres wide and 75 metres high. In 1958 a team led by Tom Harrisson, curator of the Sarawak Museum, found a human skull deep in the deposits at its entrance. It has been dated to about 40,000 years ago and is among the oldest remains of modern humans in Southeast Asia.
Later work has shown that people used the caves almost continuously from that time. The excavations produced stone tools, the bones of the animals that were hunted, some 750,000 fragments in all, and evidence that the inhabitants trapped fish and mammals, dug tubers, knew how to remove the poison from certain plants and burned the forest to manage it. Neolithic burials with pottery and ornaments lie above the older layers.
A separate chamber, the Painted Cave, has figures drawn in red haematite along its wall, thought to be about 1,200 years old. Below them were found wooden coffins shaped like boats, in which the dead were laid for a journey.
The nest collectors
The caves are still worked. Swiftlets build their nests high on the roof, and the nests are the main ingredient of bird’s nest soup, valued in Chinese cooking. Twice a year collectors from the local community climb poles of ironwood and bamboo to the ceiling, by the light of torches, and scrape the nests down. Others dig the guano on the floor for fertiliser. Millions of bats share the cave, and at dusk the birds come in as the bats go out.
For travellers
Niah is about an hour and a half by road from Miri, which has flights from Kuala Lumpur, Kuching and Kota Kinabalu. From the park office a boat crosses a small river, and a raised boardwalk runs for three kilometres through the forest to the Great Cave. The path continues through the dark interior to the Painted Cave. A torch and shoes with good grip are needed. The return walk takes three to four hours.
The visit combines with the caves and pinnacles of Mulu, Sarawak’s other World Heritage site, a short flight from Miri. Elsewhere on the island, travellers go by riverboat to track orangutans in Tanjung Puting.
Continue
