The ‘Everett Collection from Borneo Caves’ in the Natural History Museum, London: its origin, composition and potential for research
The Earl of Cranbrook (2013) provides a comprehensive inventory and provenance assessment of the zoological collection assembled by Alfred Hart Everett during the 1878–9 British Association/Royal Society-sponsored investigation of Borneo caves, now held in the Natural History Museum, London. The article reconstructs the expedition’s origins in the post-Darwinian search for the “missing link,” evaluates the reliability of Everett’s field methods, and identifies the collection’s potential for future palaeontological and archaeological research despite significant gaps in documentation and provenance.
Summary
The article traces the intellectual and institutional chain that led to Everett’s 1878–9 expedition. In 1864, Alfred Russel Wallace, drawing on his own experience of Sarawak’s limestone country, proposed to Sir Charles Lyell that an expedition be mounted to explore Borneo caves “for fossil anthropomorphs and the missing link.” After an initial, underfunded attempt by Everett in 1869–72 yielded only a Neolithic celt and superficial bones, and after the Italian botanist Beccari reported human bones and pottery from caves near Paku in 1866, the idea resurfaced. In 1878, a joint committee of the Royal Society and British Association, chaired by John Evans, raised £300 and formally appointed Everett, who by then had re-established himself as a freelance collector with strong connections to the Brooke administration. His work was observed in the field by W. T. Hornaday, who praised the thoroughness of his sieving methods (pp. 86–87).
The core of the article is a detailed reconstruction of what Everett actually did and what survives. He visited 32 caves but the published list records material from only twelve, comprising 109 lots (numbers 1–111, with 68 duplicated and 83, 101, 103 missing). A critical problem is that a substantial proportion of the lots were not from controlled excavation but were purchased from gold-washers and Malay intermediaries, often with vague or contradictory provenance statements. Everett’s own first quarterly report, his maps and plans, and the human remains examined by George Busk are all lost or unaccounted for; the Royal College of Surgeons’ accessions books confirm that Busk never formally deposited the human bones in that museum (pp. 89–91). The collection as it stands in NHM was last systematically checked by Eastham and Simons in 1959, and subsequent unrecorded sorting has further complicated provenance, as illustrated by the case study of the orangutan specimens, where mixing of lots from different sources undermines any claim that they represent a single ancient population (pp. 104–105).
The article’s most significant empirical contribution is the comparison between Everett’s stratigraphic descriptions and the results of the 2008 excavation at Gua Tupak (Everett’s Cave XIII) by a Universiti Sains Malaysia team. The 2008 trenches confirmed the broad stratigraphic sequence Everett described, and radiocarbon dates on charcoal placed the archaeologically rich upper levels in the historic period (AD 1480–1890), supporting Everett’s own judgment that these represented recent Dyak camp debris from edible-nest harvesting rather than deep prehistory (pp. 103–104). A small trial sample taken in 2004 from undisturbed deposit adjacent to Everett’s excavation B confirmed that he had selectively retained identifiable cranial elements (especially bat skulls and jaws) while discarding post-cranial fragments, explaining the pronounced bias in the surviving assemblage (p. 102).
Key Findings
- The total expedition fund was £300, of which John Evans personally raised £259 3s 0d between February and November 1878 from private subscribers and the BA (p. 87).
- The published list comprises 109 lots from 12 caves; Cave V alone contributed 29 lots (approximately one quarter of the total), making it the single most productive site (pp. 88, 96).
- Four foot-bones of the Malayan tapir (Tapirus indicus), now extinct in Borneo, are preserved in lot #26 (Palaeontology register nos. M83323, M83324, M83782, M83783), a find of considerable biogeographical significance (p. 100).
- The 2008 Gua Tupak excavation yielded 15,216 riverine gastropod shells (65% by weight), 7,332 pieces of animal skeletal remains, 641 pottery sherds, and 138 pieces of worked stone, with radiocarbon dates of AD 1480–1680 (trench A, layer 4) and AD 1650–1890 (trench B, layer 4) (p. 103).
- A quartzite microlith (height 21 mm, base 16 mm) and a single domestic dog tooth were found together in lot #31 from Cave II; if contemporaneous, this would constitute a significant instance in Borneo of a dog associated with a human artefact of “Stone Age” culture (pp. 80, 95, 106).
- The human remains examined by Busk comprised bones of at least five individuals, including 11–12 skull portions, a clavicle “of small size and delicate make, probably that of a female,” and humeral fragments showing incisions by “a sharp metallic instrument”; Busk concluded they “present nothing of special interest” and could be of either Malay or Chinese origin (pp. 90–91).
Conclusion
Cranbrook’s definitive assessment is that the Everett collection, while compromised by the loss of its first report, maps, and human remains, and by the inherent ambiguity of mixed purchased and excavated provenance, retains substantial value for comparative palaeontological research. The collection offers unique samples of bats (particularly Hipposideros diadema nobilis, with evidence of sexual dimorphism in jaw morphology), domestic and wild pig, small domestic dogs, and the extinct Malayan tapir, all of which can be tested against material from other Sarawak sites such as Niah, Bungoh, and Sireh. The 2008 radiocarbon dates anchor the upper archaeological levels in the historic period, but the deeper strata and the quartzite microlith from Cave II point to older occupation that remains to be dated.
Context
- Primary archival sources include the NHM Palaeontology and Zoology registers, the NHM Zoology Archive (holding Everett’s original second quarterly report manuscript and list), the Royal College of Surgeons’ hand-written accessions book (HMO 27.17), and the Royal Society archives (searched without success for the first report and maps).
- The article’s historiographical contribution lies in being the first comprehensive re-inventory of the collection since the 1959 Eastham/Simons check, and in directly linking the 1878–9 expedition to the 2008 USM/Sarawak Museum re-investigation of Gua Tupak, thereby providing the first radiocarbon-dated comparison with Everett’s stratigraphic descriptions.