Read the text aloud, in turns. Then, answer the questions that follow, orally.

    Let's talk about Indonesian ancient people. There were little groups of wiry men with long limbs and dark skin. They carried spears tipped with chipped stone and woven baskets loaded with edible things from the forest. They moved quietly uphill through the trees. Those men had been following the line of a thin river snaking through the hills, and they had spotted a cave from below. It formed a hollow in the western ranges of an island. The first Portuguese sailors who arrived in this place many millennia later called-it Flores or 'flowers' in their own language.

    There were few dangerous animals in these forests, but three thousand feet above sea level it would be cold after dark, and the cave would make a fine shelter for the night. The men paused for a moment on the threshold. It was a vast space, with a vaulted ceiling of dangling stalactites. They made their camp-perhaps not too far back into the darkness-and sparked a fire from the dry things in their baskets.

    The men were Melanesian hunter-gatherers, part of a wider population that was slowly picking its way through the forests of the Archipelago. The Melanesians were, as fat as we know, the first modem humans to reach Indonesia, some forty thousand years ago. They carried stone axes and buried their dead. Sometimes they laid their hands on the walls of caves; then blew a thick spray of chewed ochre pigment against the rock to leave a ghostly outline of their presence. For the most part they moved through the open forests or along streams and shorelines, hunting out fruits and roots, fish and shellfish, and wild animals for meat. Eventually, in more fertile landscapes, they settled into hut clusters and cleared the ground for a simple kind of agriculture.

Adopted from: Tim Hannigan, A Brief History of Indonesia Sultans, Spices, and Tsunamis: The Incredible Story of Southeast Asia's 'Largest Nation, USA, Tuttle Publishing, 2015.

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