Blake Singley:

Good afternoon and welcome to the National Library of Australia. My name is Blake Singley and I'm the Director of Rights Management here at the Library in the Collection Branch. I'd like to begin by acknowledging Australia's First Nation people as the traditional owners of the land upon we are meeting on today and pay my respects to elders past and present and pass on those respects to all Australian Aboriginal and to Torres Strait Islander people. Thank you for attending today's event coming to you from Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country.

Just before we start, I'll ask everybody to please switch off their phones or put them on silent so we don't disturb the presentation today. This afternoon's presentation, Early Philippine Palaeontology is by Dr. Pauline Basilia, a 2026 National Library of Australia Fellow.

Our fellowship programme support researchers to make intensive use of the National Library's Collection through residencies of three months. National Library of Australia Fellowships are made possible by generous philanthropic support and Dr. Pauline Basilia's fellowship has been kindly supported by the HS Williams Trust. Dr. Pauline Basilia is one of the few Filipino palaeontologists actively working on plasticine material, striving to decolonize our understanding of the development of Philippine palaeontology. In a presentation today, Pauline will discuss her fellowship research into the library's H. Otley Beyer collection and her attempts to reconcile data on early explorations of Philippine palentology for use in present in future projects. Please join me in welcoming Pauline Becilia.

Pauline Basilia:

Hello. Is this loud enough? Okay. Ah, thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to start this presentation with two things. First is I do apologise in advance. I am not feeling very well. I came in the summer and now it's not summer and it's taking quite a bit of a time to adjust. Second is, I'd like to thank several other people who have made this fellowship incredibly rewarding and very successful and very productive. I'd like to thank Dr. Piper, soon to be Dr. Piper, Ms. Piper, Ms. Pineda, Mr. Matthews, and all of my Canberra family. Thank you so much for having me guys. And of course, the wonderful people at the National Library of Australia, especially at the special collections room that I go to nearly every day in the last three months. Thank you very much. So my talk will be about a fellow named Henry Otley Beyer.

He is an American and this is what he looks like in his latter years. Still quite damper, wearing the exact same suit he wore back when he was younger. It's like a uniform, they said, according to the people who knew him. This talk is divided into three parts. Majority of it would be the first two parts. We will be discussing Otley Beyer's life. I will be calling him Beyer from now on. And then we will go into his contributions into palaeontology of which he had a lot. And then we will go into future directions for the collection as well as for Philippine research. So I'm going to go ahead and get started with the Beyer collection. So the collection was acquired in 1972, and I believe according to legend, it was turned over by his remaining family who had moved to Australia. He was survived.

So when Beyer died, he was survived by his wife and his sons and his grandchildren, and I believe that they left the Philippines and migrated to Australia. And that is where the majority of the collection came from. The collection itself can be classified or be called as personal effects. That's why they were not turned over to the National Museum, according to legend. And when I looked into the boxes, there are 100 boxes, not joking, full of stuff, in various conditions. And a lot of them really were personal effects. For example, I'm going to talk about some of the pictures here, some of my favourites. This is what we call a 'cedula'. So it's a receipt that the government issues for you to be taxed. This is Beyer's old passport, 1920s. He had a lot of letters, letters on letters, on letters. Some of the contemporaries of Beyer said that Beyer would take months to reply to a letter sent to him because his letters were pages and pages long.

And what Beyer would do was he had a typist, a secretary, who would make multiple copies of his letters of his replies, and those had survived in his personal collections. We also have some certificates of some of his achievements as well as his membership, such as the National Research Council here. And he also had a lot of ephemerals such as this one. So this is an envelope addressed to him from the National Museum. And Beyer was also a part of the University of the Philippines. So he had a lot of university communications such as the schedule of classes from the very beginning of his career, which is just a few years from the beginning of the university, as we know now. You can actually trace the history of the university using the Beyer Collection, but unfortunately, three months would not be enough to do that.

Solheim is one of his contemporaries. Solheim is an archaeologist, an American archaeologist, and they were pretty tight from 1930s and onwards. He said, "By looking briefly at the life of Beyer, we can understand the development of Philippine history studies a little better." And this was published as part of remembering Beyer. So that was one of the primary things that I read before I came. And that really inspired me to look into Beyer, how he had contributed not just to archaeology, ethnography, and anthropology, but also maybe to palaeontology. And I was right. But before we go into palaeontology, we have to look at Beyer's life so that we can put things that he did, his accomplishments and his research into context. I'm not going to go into his personal life, which is quite exciting actually, but we are going to go into his career. So there are several sections of his career from his early years all the way to his later careers.

There is a gap in this because of World War II, which I will tell you all about because it's also quite a story. So in 1904, Beyer had just graduated from University of Denver. He graduated as a geologist and a chemist. He was also a part of some US government exploration and mapping expeditions within the United States. So he was quite familiar with explorations and expeditions, and his name had been put forward whenever there would be projects like that for the US government. Beyer wasn't interested in the Philippines until he went to the St. Louis exposition. It's the World Fair. So what happened was there was 42 acres of land that they converted into some sort of like a museum, a living museum, or like a zoo. And I say that because what they did was they transplanted houses and buildings and people to the US to exhibit them for the American public.

And one of those audiences was Beyer. This entire project was handled by Jenks, Albert Jenks. And when Beyer met Albert Jenks, because Beyer had the history and experience of expeditions, Jenks invited him to come to the Philippines with him with an ethnological survey back in 1904. And that was the very first time that Beyer came to the Philippines. And from then on, he was known to really fall in love with the research into Philippine ethnology. So at this point, Beyer was an ethnologist. The results of this expedition was published in Jenks' book, The Bonton Igorot, where they went to Northern Luzon to document the different indigenous groups that were present there. Now, here's where things get a little murky. So according to Wikipedia, Beyer was there as a teacher. They weren't entirely wrong and there was confusion. Was he there as a teacher? Did he teach there as part of the push of the US government for the people to learn English?

Basically, that was the programme. According to the war letters that Beyer had kept, and these are some of the earliest letters that are within the collection, he went there with a contract, and by the time he got there, the ethnological survey was dissolved. There was a restructuring. Luckily, the ethnological survey was put under the Bureau of Education. So on paper, Beyer was there as a teacher, but in reality, he performed the duties of what would have been the objectives of the ethnological survey.

So he continued the research within that realm, and eventually they were able to map the Philippines. So this is the results of the ethnological survey. These are the known non-Christian tribes within the Philippines at that time. Beyer understood that he did not have the correct training to continue as an ethnologist. So in 1908, he went back to the US and trained in Harvard with Roland Dixon for two years, and then came back afterwards to continue. But then in 1914, the ethnological survey was completely dissolved. And since Beyer had powerful friends, by that time, he was absorbed into the university of the Philippines. In that period as well, Beyer was able to travel throughout Island Southeast Asia and Mainland Southeast Asia, and was introduced to several prehistorians such as [unclear]. And they remained his heroes and the people that he would talk to whenever he would find anything prehistoric.

So now we're going to go into Beyer as an archaeologist and palaeontologist. Archaeologist first, because that is what he was known for. By the 1920s, Beyer was making a name for himself. He was the guy. If you're going to do prehistory in the Philippines, you would go to one guy and that is Beyer. So Worcester had been there longer than Beyer had, had been in the Philippines longer than he had as part of the US government. Worcester explored the Vessias in the 1920s, possibly assisted by Beyer. To what extent we do not yet know, but in 1922 to 1925, Carl Guthe from the University of Michigan started his archaeological exploration. I was very lucky to go to University of Michigan to look at this collection. And so Guthe didn't quite like the Philippines as much as Beyer had. So it was very surreal to find out that Beyer and Guthe had worked together.

Guthe had amassed quite a large number of artefacts. The reason for that is because what Guthe went to the Philippines for was to get all the artefacts to put into the University of Michigan Museum and Beyer helped with that. So that was about the training that Beyer had as an archaeologist assisting these people who were exploring the area. In 1925, Beyer had been officially appointed as the chair, the very first one of the Department of Anthropology. That's how he is known as right now and before, that he was part of the university as the major anthropologist. And by 1926, Beyer was on his own. And this was the very first time the Novoliche's exploration that he was performing as an archaeologist. The Novelicious exploration wasn't really going to happen until they were building a dam, the Novalichis dam still standing today. And they were finding, basically in the end, what they found, we realised was a grave site, and there were so many artefacts.

They had no idea what was happening. So the people who were digging, they didn't know what was happening. So they called on the guy, which was Beyer. So he came in and finally he was recognised as an archaeologist. The Novalichis exploration was followed by another one in 1928. Now, this one was initiated by Beyer, so it wasn't accidental. He wanted to go to the Risal Province because people at that area were bringing him artefacts. And the result of that is this. So he was able to collect all of the artefacts. Now, here is a little bit of a background on those explorations. So Beyer at that time trained as anthropologist, but not really as an archaeologist. And one of the major things that were said about him is that he didn't do his job right because he didn't know how to be an archaeologist. Now compared to people like [unclear] who was really trained, his reports weren't really at the same type of readings, reading materials.

His work did not follow the conventions of what an archaeologist would have come up with. So those are the things that we need to consider when we're looking into Beyer's reports. They were very different because he wasn't really a trained archaeologist, but that didn't stop Beyer because really there wasn't really anyone there except him, so nobody could tell him what to do. So in 1932, he went to Batangas and he did the exact same thing he was doing in result Novalichis. People would come with their artefacts. He would do an interview. "What is your name? Where do you live? Where did you find the artefacts? How did you find the artefacts?" So all of that is collected into his inventory records, which are at present in upstairs. By 1933, he did the Pugad-Babuy collections, and this was primarily 'Tektites' collections, which I'll get into later.

1935 to 1940, he did Santa Mesa and Kobao collections as well, which are also focused more on deep history rather than more protohistoric, so metal age and iron age and things like that. So he was starting by the mid 1920s by Novolichis and Rizal, he was already starting to really get into pre-history, deep history, thousands of years old, not just thousands actually. It's hundreds of years old. Actually, the 1928 survey was the most important one because that's the first time that he found tektites. And we'll talk a little bit about tektites later.

In the 1930s as well, as he was doing all of these explorations, he was also trying to share them with the world. And this primarily for me was one of his greatest achievements in life. They had a lot of Congresses. I didn't know that. And then I realised that when there were so many paperwork about Congress, there was one in Tokyo, one in Taiwan, in Hanoi, et cetera. The one in Hanoi in 1932 was one of the most important ones. It's called the Far Eastern Prehistoric Congress. It is where all the archaeologists and anthropologists would come together and they will discuss all the fines. And what they were trying to do was exactly what Beyer said here to bring together and correlate all of this data to make regional conclusions, regional assumptions about regions, not just specific areas. And he was very successful with that because he was able to connect with so many different people that by 1935, the Congress now happened in Manila and it was all supervised by Beyer.

There was another far Eastern Preshistoric Congress that happened in 1955, 53, 55, that I'll get into later on, but this first one was in Hanoi, and this was the very first time that he would meet some of the more important people that will figure into this presentation. We'll leave that for now. We're going to go back to that time of his life as it is where he was doing all of his data collection, because we need to talk about World War II. Now, World War II was a devastating event to many, to everyone, and one of the most fascinating stories of Beyer's life happened in World War II. So Beyer is quite lucky. So Beyer is an American living in the Philippines and then the Japanese came. So you know that it's going to be a little bit heated, so he wasn't completely safe the whole entire time.

Luckily, he struck up a friendship with the [unclear]. The [unclear] is the Japanese civilian that they sent, that the Japanese sent to take care of all things museum. The Japanese wanted to protect, they said, on paper, all of the museum pieces and historical pieces from devastation. And quite a lot of Beyer's concern was to protect the materials that he had collected. So it's not just the Beyer collection, his personal collection, but also the museum.

In fact, there was a story where Beyer put a cot outside the door of the museum and he would sleep there every night. Now, to what purpose that is, is I don't really know because Beyer against armed men, I don't think he's going to win. But he did that. And he kept a lot of the personal Beyer collections in three places. He kept it in his houses, two houses in Ermita. This is one of them. So this is the house. This road still stands today.

And see, this is the hospital, the Philippine General Hospital. So he thought, Hey, Ermita, it's residential. No one's going to bomb that. I'm going to put all of the nice stuff in my houses and then keep all of the duplicates in the government and university buildings. So this is a university building, the Watson building. And back then, the University of the Philippines was situated in Vilman and Manila. Unfortunately for Beyer, he did it, he thought wrong. And at the end of World War II, after the battle, Battle of Manila, Ermita and the university was levelled. They say that in the university, only the ablation statue, the main statue of the university stood. There were no standing walls, and his house was in rubbles. So whatever were in those houses, they're gone by then. By 1942, half of his collection was decimated. The Watson Building stood very luckily for him.

Unfortunately, later on, it was ransacked by American forces and he was unable to get all of the things back. There were some things that were kept. And even the library of the Bureau of Science, they say wasn't ashes. So all of the publications were gone.

After World War II, Solheim said that Beyer wasn't really as active anymore, probably he was also getting ill, but he was still actually very productive at that time. And some of these long, long awaited publications were finally published, starting with the 'Outline Review' that was released in 1949. Now, the 'Outline Review' is the Bible, basically, of early Philippine archaeology. So whatever had been done in the past since Beyer's time would be in the outline review. In 1953, as I have said, the far Eastern History Congress happened in Manila, and this was where quite a lot of the palaeontology material was published. So we were learning about it for the very first time in 1953. And up until that time, nobody was really talking about palaeontology. No one was talking about Pleistocene even. It was only Beyer and his colleagues. In 1959 through 1964, he was awarded his honorary doctorates because Beyer wasn't a doctor.

He wasn't even an archaeologist, a palaeontologist. He was somewhat of an anthropologist. And in 1962, finally, a few years before his death, the Philippine 'Tektites' volume were published.

So a lot of people know about Beyer's work through the three wave migration theory. And this theory, for a very long time, even when I was a kid, was in primary school textbooks. It is now removed. It has now quote unquote been debunked because people had problems with the lack of data, things not adding up archaeologically and anthropologically, but he was still well known as the guy who made the three wave migration theory. Now, having said that, my main issue with the three wave migration theory is how the data was collected. The main data that he used for the three wave migration theory was collected in 1920s or before the 1920s, when he was part of the ethnological survey, when he was just starting out with archaeology. And majority of what he had come up with really was a report that he submitted to the Commonwealth government, the US government, to better understand how to govern the Philippines.

It was colonial data, basically. So a lot of people are starting to move away from this, but it's still worth mentioning that he had actually been the very first one to come up with something like this, that how the Philippines was populated in the past.

In his later years, when he was no longer very active, he was very ill. He was said to be physically healthy, looked like he was still getting around, but he suffered from memory loss, which was quite devastating. And at the end of his life, he was at the university infirmary, and he was well taken care of by the university, which was great. And at his death, he was placed in an Ifugao death house following Catholic and Litherian rights with a Ifugao death ceremony. The reason for this is because he married an Ifugao lady. The lady is a princess. She was the daughter of a chief, and they remained married up until his death. They had several children. One of them was named William Beyer, and he has letters in the collection as well.

So Solheim had this to say towards the end that "Beyer will not be remembered as a great anthropologist, archaeologist, or prehistorian. He will be remembered in the Philippines for his single-minded devotion to the Philippines and all things Filipino enter the world as the founder of Philippine archaeological research". And I hope to add to this by saying that he didn't just become an archaeologist on Philippine materials. He was also a palaeontologist, believe it or not. So we're going to go into some of his work in palaeontology. Now, mind you, I am still going through data. There's so, so much data.

It's like iceberg levels. I have not even scratched the surface here. So this picture is a stagadone. Stagadon tooth. I believe that, I could be wrong. This was taken by Lawrence Wilson, and this is from Cagayan. So Cagayan is very famous. Recently, there are a lot of new discoveries. When I say recent in the last 20 years, so one of the most recent one is that we found a new Stagadon skull already been published in 2025. This is from Cagayan Valley. Another one from Cagayan Valley is the one, the near complete rhinoceros skeleton. And Cagayan actually was first well known for its skeleton. They weren't really looking at stagadones or elephants or anything like that. It was really known for the rhino. So having found a new complete rhino, which had alluded them, alluded us for 40 years is a feat. They also reanalyzed the 'celebochoerus cagayanensis' and a celebochoerus is a pig, a pig with four tusks, and it was massive, and it's scary.

And there are some versions of this still in existence in Indonesia as well. I just saw it in Bali, wonderful place. I hear Australians still like it, and we reanalyzed it. Well, they reanalyzed it and found out that it is related to the one in [unclear], and that's quite important. I'm going to show you in a little bit. Prior to that, our work of some people that we are incredibly grateful for, Gert van den Bergh's work started actually in 2009. His work is primarily centred in Indonesia, but he did some analysis of the Philippine material as well. Majority really of the Philippine material was studied by John de Vos. Now, Gert van den Bergh is my academic father, and John de Vos is his academic father. In between, there are a lot of work where John de Vos' students, so Gert van den Bergh is one of those students on 'stegodon luzonensis', so our stegodon.

I don't know when I'm going to explain what a stegodon is. I'm going to do it right now. So there are elephants and the then there are stegodons which kind of look like elephants. They're both proboscideans. Proboscideans are animals with a trunk.

The difference between the stegodon and an elephant is many things. One of the most visual one is that the tusk of an elephant grows straight down. It's straight. The stegodon, it grows on a curve. Another elephant that thus that is a mammoth. It's tusk grows on a curve. We had both elephants in the Philippines. John de Vos was, well, all of our modern knowledge of these stegodons and elephants really started with John de Vos. But before that, there was just Beyer. Beyer and another guy, my favourite guy, which I cannot wait to introduce you to. So why am I doing this? I believe that this is the natural progression of a discipline. The results of scientific research are really shaped by the social and political context with which the research is carried out. Now, these changes through time because knowledge generation is constantly in motion. It is always happening, ever changing, it's full of potential, and importantly, it is incredibly unpredictable.

Now, if we believe, well, or I believe that if we don't stop and take a look at where or how this data is generated, we would lose touch with why we're doing this. So I think it's very timely that we start trying to figure out how palaeontology had started so that the future of palaeontology could be mapped out. Well, at least that could be understood in a different perspective.

They say, anthropologists, that this is the age of new materialism where we seek to understand not only the matter, so the new discoveries, the new species, but also to understand our different roles in the production of this knowledge. What is this knowledge for? Who is it for? How was it generated? So that within that framework, our understanding really of palaeontology in the Philippines is very, very different from everybody else's. Palaeontology in other countries, especially the more developed ones, the palaeontology is now more developed there than in the Philippines, really started with dinosaurs.

Now there's a catch. We don't have dinosaurs in the Philippines because they all died out before the Philippines was even made as we know now. So we can't do that. So what else can we do? Pleistocene palaeontology instead could be seen through mega mammals because they're also big and they're also fascinating, such as rhino, elephant and stegodon and others. Now they're incredibly quite young and I wouldn't really imagine a movie to be made out of someone getting killed by being chased by stegodon because stegodons and elephants they don't run. So it's not as fun to come to think of it, but it's also really quite important. Philippine palaeontology also is understood through the lens of regional context, which is great really. But for me, personally, as a researcher in my career, I would like to see this importance that we put on regional context also be put into a more Filipino context, an us-ness.

An appreciation for Philippine prehistory is what we're aiming for because quite recently with YouTube and AI, there's a lot of misinformation going around. And with that, it's also a lot of looting, a lot of black market exchanges of fossils, because what happens is that people, because they're poor, when they find fossils, they don't tell the local government, they don't tell the museum, they would post it on Facebook and then somebody would message them, "Can I buy that off of you for 500 pesos?" That 500 pesos is $12 Australian, and that's a lot of money already for quite a lot of people. And so the black market trade is really something else, and we're trying to just keep ahead of that. And so I think this research becomes very important so that people will understand that these things are important for you.

So within the beginning of the concept of the beginnings of palaeontology, I'm looking for three things because these are the standards of how we understand palaeontology in the Philippines. First is the appreciation of large mammals, which we already got into, the palaeontology of having big mammals. Because in the Philippines, there's nothing big mammals out there right now. The biggest thing that we have probably would be a crocodile and that's not big. It's the concept of elephants in the Filipino psyche is not present because this is not something that we see every day. There are no stories. It's like when I explain this to my students like this, if somebody tells you run, there's a lion behind you chasing you, going to eat you. It's not going to be scary for them because a lion is not something we see in our culture versus, "Oh, a crocodile is going to come and eat you better run." That's scary because we know what it is.

We've seen what it is. Another concept, an important concept is the concept of Wallachia and the land bridge connections that connects the Philippines with the rest of Southeast Asia. And the third one, the most important one for me is Insular dwarfism. Now I'm going to go into that in a little bit, each of them and how Beyer contributed. Now there is a problem with Beyer when I talk about this, just keep this in mind, that Beyer lacked training in palaeontology. He did have help. He had a lot of help, and it is with that, that he was able to make these theories and assumptions and these publications. He was also very secretive. In fact, he took things quite personally. So there was a story about [unclear]. [unclear] is a very good archaeologist. He went into the Philippines. He was trying to get into the Philippines because he was fascinated by the connection between Vietnam and the Philippines.

And then he said, Beyer told him, "Okay, you go to this place, but I will not be there with you." And when [unclear] came back without finding any sights, he said, "Oh, that's because I wasn't there. He's not very good see." So it is because of that, that we believe that quite a lot of Beyer's data is hidden. It is secret and that's on top of data that already been lost because in World War II, a lot of things had been lost and also Beyer was the only one who understood his filing system. Nobody understood it. It was organised chaos. Up until now, I still didn't understand it, like looking through it, like, what is happening?

So let's go back to Beyer's career. In the beginning, in his early career, Beyer had already understood that palaeontology was a big part of Philippine prehistory. He didn't start with Neolithic, so New Stone Age. He didn't start with stone age. He started with fossil mammals. He started with elephants, with rhino, and he understood that he was the very first one to say, "I think we're going to find early man, as old as Java man, who is pretty old, his homoerectus in the Philippines. He was the very first one to say that within the context also of palaeontology." And that thought had carried on until the early 2000s, until the late 2000s, actually until 2019, when we finally found Early Man, like really early man dated to 100,000 years ago. Up until that time, it was just Beyer and quite a few others who were saying that early men, these fossils will be found, you just need to look.

That's a major contribution. He also had work on tektites. So tektites are glassy material that came from cosmic places. It was a meteor that went down when the meteor went down, it burned the sediments, and as the sediments were falling back down to earth, it had cooled and become glassy. So those are tektites. Beyer early on actually said, "I think tektites and megafauna all were at the same time. Wherever there is tektites, there will be mammals. Wherever there is mammals, there would be humans." This concept is now ingrained in us and we actually take it for granted, tektites, mammals, and then humans. This was the very first time that it had been presented.

So Beyer had started to bring in people, and I'll get into that very, very soon. And then towards the end of his career in 1956, this was the very first time that anyone had ever written about a more regional, a more holistic view of Philippine megafauna in 1956 in his megafauna paper. And it was updated in 1958 as well, also really fascinating. Beyer's palaeontology story really starts with this guy. So this guy is Ralph von Koenigswald. Von Collins Wald works in Java. He published about Java Man, [unclear] when they were first being found. It wasn't called Java Man back then, I don't think. So he was in Java and he was fascinated with tektites too. So he and Beyer became friends. And in 1935, Von Koenigswald went to the Philippines to attend the Far Eastern Prehistory Congress. By the way, Congress is like these still exist today.

It now has a different name. It's called India Pacific Prehistory Congress that's going to happen in November. It's the biggest party of archaeologist ever.

Seven days, no rest. So it's going to be the same. This is the same. So this is like its grandfather. And when Ralph came, Beyer was in awe. He said, and he said this multiple times across multiple years in multiple publications, Ralph is the best palaeontologist in Southeast Asia. So why does that matter? Because Beyer chose Ralph amongst everybody else because there's Hui, there's [unclear], okay, cannot pronounce his name. There's several other people working in the area, but he chose Koenigswald, von Koesnigswald, to give our fossils to for analysis. So every single one, every single fossil, everything we know about them came from Von Koenigswald. Now, if you ask a random archaeology student who Von Koenigswald is, he wouldn't know who he is. Up until this time, people don't know about him. In Borneo, that's very different. In Borneo, he's quite well known. So when I was at the museum and I was talking to our colleagues in Borneo, I was like, "I think Von Koenigswald was here." He was like, "Wow, he's great." He did all of Borneo.

Turns out he did all of Philippines too, and this is something we want to include in our narrative now. He even went ask for, So this is one of von Koenigswald's world greatest achievement. He was able to describe for the very first time a pygmy elephant and pygmy elephant, there's only one 'elephas beyeri'. Now I put it in quotes because I have problems with elephas now. I might as well say it here. Okay. So Von Koenigswald compared this elephas with another elephant, 'elephas antiquus'. 'Elephas antiquus' is a mainland giant, giant elephant while the elephant that Beyer gave Von Koenigswald was tiny, tiny, tiny. How tiny was this elephant to be able to be called pygmy? You're looking at 10% of the size of an 'elephas antiquus'. So if an 'elephas antiquus' is 5,000 kilogrammes, this was 500. So it's tiny, tiny, tiny. And this is quite common in the Philippines.

So when Koenigswald said, "This is an entirely new species, and because you're my greatest friend, I'm going to name it after you, 'Elephas Beyeri'." Later on in 2012, Elephas antiques really, the name is now palaeoloxodon antiquus because the genus, palaeoloxodon was a subgenus, became a genus on its own. So 'Elephas Beyeri' really is a 'palaeoloxodon beyeri'. There's drama on that, but I will not get into because we will never finish.

So Philippine palaeontology through Beyer, as I mentioned, he already recognised that there are fossil finds in the Philippines that are dated to the Pleistocene. So the Pleistocene really sounds not very long, but it's really 2.5 million years ago. 2.5 to 11,000 years ago is where we're looking at. That's a long time. Until Beyer, there was really no systematic study of fossil finds, and I cannot emphasise this enough. There had only been one before Beyer, and this was the 'Stegadon Mindanensis' by Naoman, which was published in 1902, 1901, and then Beyer. Beyer understood that he needed expertise. That's why he called on von Koenigswald for help. And if he hadn't done that, we wouldn't have any of the data that we have now.

So let's talk about Wallacea. So Wallacea is a biogeographic area, which means it's make believe. There is what they call the Wallace line. The Wallace line initially went through in between Borneo and Sulawesi, all the way up between Palawan and Bordeo and all the way up. Actually, no, it ended right there, but then they extended it later on in the Huxley line. There's another line between Australia and the Philippines. Well, Popeye and the rest of Australia and the Philippines. It's called Lidikar line right there. Also, imaginary line. You won't really find it physically. What it divides is animals. So the animals over here, so this is what you call the Sunda shelf, and right where Australia is the Sahu shelf. There are two different animals types. So the animals here are not going to be found in animals here. And in Malazia, you're not going to be able to find animals here that are here and here.

Basically, it's three different areas that you're looking at. And he recognised that the animals from the Philippines and Wallacea actually came from Sunda shelf, not Sahu, not anywhere else.

He also supported the land bridges. Now, today, the land bridges, they're common knowledge. There's going to be Pleistocene, there's going to be ice age. And then when it's ice age, the sea level, it goes down. And because it goes down, it exposes a lot of the areas. The islands get bigger and because they're so big, sometimes they connect with other islands, including becoming very, very close to Sunda shelf. And the animals, because they're big, they could just cross over by land and some swimming into the Philippines. And after the ice ages, the sea level would go up again and these land bridges would be lost and the animals will be trapped. There are many, many debates on what land bridges were used. This is the migration patterns. What Beyer had at the time was two, from Borneo up Palawan, up to Luzon, and from Borneo up to Mindanao.

So two, there's a third one from Sulawesi. And right now, there's another that's being proposed from Southern China down to Taiwan, down into Luzon. This is what the new Kagayan is proposing. Now, okay, that's fine. I like, in my future research, what I'm going to be focusing on really is disconnection between Sulawesi, because I think that a lot of people have really forgotten about that. There's a lot of little islands in between, and that you can very easily island hop all the way up, but that's still going to be analysed in the future. Something to look forward to. Insular dwarfism. Now, unfortunately, there aren't a lot of animal pictures in the Beyer collections. He wasn't really interested in documenting animals because there was already another guy doing that. His name is Taylor. He came up with three volumes of the animals in the Philippines. Okay.

And as I mentioned already, there is 'Elephas Beyeri', which is the only pygmy elephant. There's a problem with this. There's one tooth. By 1955, Beyer insists. It's in the Bureau of Science. There's no longer Bureau of Science and we cannot find this tooth. So actually, I came here and I was trying to see if Beyer would say that I sent it to Von Koenigswald at Utrecht. Then it would be with Von Koenigswald at Utrecht and it could be found. Beyer said that it was at the Bureau of Science, so I cannot find it. We'll see. I just wanted to mention one of the sites that Beyer really loved. This is Cabarruyan Island, and this is my favourite site. And I was very surprised because he also said that it is his favourite site. So we kind of, hey, seeing eye to eye here. So this is a map that he drew and he labelled where the tektites sites are.

So T is for tektite. And here, this is the island right there. Tiny little island can barely see it. There's a letter F for fossils because this is one of the major fossil bearing sites in the Philippines, really. And people went there quite a couple of times and nobody could find another pygmy tooth. I planned to go there in two years time to do an excavation, so that's very exciting. So Cabarruyan is where they found the little elephant, the pygmy elephant. In 1953, von Koenigswald actually came to the island, tried to find another one, unsuccessful.

In 1955, Beyer sent one of his people, Wilson, "Go find me the elephant. We need more elephant." He went there and he identified two sites. One of these sites is actually one of the sites that I'm looking at, Awile. And this is the first time I'm seeing Awile in the records ever. This is the very first mention of Awile being a fossil bearing site, which is very exciting. So this is one of the future directions of research is to go to that island based on what we know now from the Beyer collections, what inventory they had because Wilson wrote a letter to Beyer. I have five boxes, eight boxes, all full of fossils. So if he found that, we will find more. And that's quite very exciting. I'm not going to show maps of where I'm going because people might try to get there before me.

We don't want that. Future directions very quickly now. So we're running out of time. More people, more power. The last three months, I came here nearly every day. I looked through 100 boxes and I barely touched the pictures, the negatives and the bound volumes. They're all up there waiting for me, but I got ill and I can't touch it right now. So somebody else has to come do the continuation of this work. Areas such as ethnography, people have come here for that already, which is great because there are so many [unlcear' ]I didn't even look at them. That's how little time I have. Archaeology and history, I have some recommendations. Robert Fox is my favourite archaeologist. He's the one who did Tabon Man, the very first early man in the Philippines dated to 45,000 years old. His mock up of his report where he reported the results of the carbon dating is upstairs.

I've never seen it before. These maps are hand drawn. So that's how I know it's mockup. And this logo here that was pasted onto the front because it was literally a mockup. So this is something that people can come in. The whole history of Fox is here. Why? Because I didn't realise Fox worked for Beyer. Everybody's saying Kangaya, that's a Fox site. All these palaeolithic sites, all these Pleistocene sites are Fox sites. They're Beyer sites. Beyer said Fox and Fox made a very good reports. That's how we say that it's Fox's sites, not really. Well, not just. We also have pages and pages of handwritten inventory records. And when I saw them for the very first time in a very quiet room, I opened them and I said, "Oh my God." And then the person next to me says, "That's either a good thing or a bad thing." I'm like, "I don't even know how to react".

It's just, I don't know what to do. Pages and pages can barely read these handwritten things because they're handwritten." And mind you, he had a typist, so don't understand why these are handwritten, but that's a personal thing. Okay? And lastly, historians need to come here to look at the World War II collection. I didn't even touch it. I took a couple of pictures and then I let it be because I really can't deal. When I say World War II collections, I meant the Commonwealth collections, pre-World War II. Manuel El Kesson, he's the president. He became the president. He has letters to other people in the Beyer collection when he was merely a congressman, pages and pages of letters. Manuel Caso and Carino, all of these presidents, all in there, all upstairs. I don't know what to do. I'm not very well trained in that area, so somebody has to come in.

And he actually Beyer in World War II. I don't know why, because I couldn't figure it out. He has these cards. It's very Japanese. So the Japanese possibly gave it to him, and his job was to write down every single person's detail of every single foreigner in Manila. Boxes of them, all bundled up in ribbons. Very good condition. Somebody has to come in and take a look at that, because I didn't know what they are.

So lastly, what is the Beyer collection? In the end, it is a personal collection, but it's a personal collection of a very important person. This is a person that has lived through the history that we're studying now. This is the person that moved and created knowledge. He chose what knowledge to create, and he chose who to give it to. Now, I feel like it is the job now of current and future archaeologists, anthropologists, et cetera, to come in and find out who he gave it to, why he made these knowledge and where we should put this in the context of our own understanding of our own history. And with that, thank you very much, National Library of Australia, everyone I know here, everyone had interacted with me, and I'm very sorry for the special collections ladies who would come up to me and I would give them the side eye because sorry, I was really keeping things in my head.

And so if you come talk, it's not that I'm being rude. I should say if you come talk to me, I would forget what I was doing, but you're very lovely. Everyone's been lovely. Thank you very much.

Blake Singley:

Thank you. Thank you. Join me. Join me and thanking, Pauline. Look, I think we've got time for one quick question. If anybody has a question, please use the microphone because this is being recorded and being available online as well. So there's a question here at the front, but it has to be a quick one, please. No, no. I couldn't stop her. She was so excited, but it was great.

Audience member 1:

Thank you very much for the presentation. I was really struck with this theorial point migration, which has probably been debunked. There's probably no evidence. But can we say, based on the archaeological evidence, that the Philippines had been people since 45,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago based on the tektites and the other archaeological finds? Thank you.

Pauline Basilia:

All right. That's a very good question, actually. So in terms of people-ing for early humans in the Philippines, Beyer had something to say about that. He had very strong opinions. He said, and it's connected with what I was talking about earlier. The mammals were not found on their own. Majority of the fossil fines of these stegadons and rhino, et cetera, were accompanied by stone tools. No one can make stone tools if you're not human. You need thumbs and knowledge. So only humans can make stone tools. If the mammals are there and the stone tools are there, there's going to be humans there. And so he believed with that line of reasoning, he believed that the humans in the Philippines were very ancient and he was the very first one to say that because back then, because there was only Beyer doing archaeology in the Philippines, nobody really know anything about the Philippines.

So everybody else in Southeast Asia was saying, "Oh, the Philippines, that's very recent. That's only 2,000 years old." Nothing older than that. Beyer was the only one saying, "That's not true. I got stone tools and mammals and tektites. I'm at least a hundred thousand years old." He was saying that to everybody in these conferences. So yes, actually Beyer had a very big contribution when it comes to championing how old people in the Philippines had been. So we have been in the Philippines technically, the record now is, 130,000 right now.

Blake Singley:

Thank you for that. I'm going to abuse my power of being up here because I've got a pressing question, if that's okay. In the context of the new materialism and of decolonizing the places in palaeontology, why is this collection in Australia and at the National Library?

Pauline Basilia:

Oh, that's a very good question. I didn't want to get into that, but you open it. Yes. There's a legend. Yeah. It goes like this. It was up for auction. The whole collection was up for auction. I don't know what Auction House handled it. I don't know how. The National Museum found out, so they got everything they had pulled together, all the funds that they could ever have that they come over and then the bidding started. They didn't have enough funds. But that's legend. I don't really know what's going on.

Blake Singley:

You can rest assured that we're looking after it here at the National Library Of Australia.

Pauline Basilia:

I'm very happy that you are. I think that's a very important thing to do, to take care of this collection. Up until this moment in time when we don't have enough people right now, for me personally, don't quote me on this off the record. I'm okay with this collection being here, but it's great if we could do a digital version of the collection and have it be available to the people at the National Museum of the Philippines in a sort of collaboration as they have done with the University of Michigan, the Guthea collection there. The records are now on digital and the National Museum can access them. And maybe there's collaboration that can be made for the Beyer collection as well, but a hundred boxes, so you can take your time.

Blake Singley:

Thank you. Look, as we draw to a close, I just want to do a couple quick plugs before we leave. I hope you can join us for our next fellowship lecture, a cultural biography of Frank Morehouse, which will be delivered by the 2026 National Library Fellow, Dr. Matthew Lamb, at 12:30 PM on Tuesday, 19th of May. Our website is the place you're able to find recordings of recent talks and performances from our fellows. And these are also available at the library's YouTube channel. Thank you for coming today and join me once again and congratulating Pauline Basilia on what was really a very exciting and fascinating presentation. Thank you so much for that. Thank you.

Pauline Basilia:

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.