It’s a work of crafted precision in environment where they don’t even have a ruler to ensure a straight line, yet there are still 800 surviving orang asli (aborigines) in Taman Negara.
All they do is hunt for food to live – nomadic life.
I visited a family of orang asli yesterday and had quite interesting insights about their lives in the jungle.
They speak their own language to communicate with each other, and their own “code Morse” when hunting.
The best technolpgy they have – to ensure their survival – is a hunting devise called sumpit or blowpipe.
A sumpit is only used to hunt for food – animals that live on trees. To hunt ground animals like wild boar, they use spears.
The actual functional sumpit is actually the inside the casing what I thought was THE sumpit before. It is a smaller straight tube made of a rare bamboo which is not easy to find. Two pieces of this rare bamboo is then straighten slowly with heat and connected to each other using some leaves and damar (one of the most important natural materials in traditional devises, even boat making for having rubber-like properties) . The outer layer (slightly bigger bamboo) is just a casing, which protects the hunting equipment to keep it safe and accurate at all time especially while walking in the jungle.
A sumpit can shoot as far as 70 meter!
The “blow head” is made of damar so that 100% of the air from the mouth can be channeled into the sumpit for strong thrust to push the darts.
A ring is carved on the casing for each animal killed using the sumpit.
An orang asli man who want to get married need to know how to hunt. The Tok Batin gives a hunting assignment for a period of time (a couple of hours).
If the man comes back empty handed, he is not then qualified to get married.
I also watched a demonstration how they “made” fire from a cool “fire starter” made of rattan and a piece of wood. It’s a mazing to watch them to get a flame within minutes in an environment where there is no matchsticks or Zippos.
Their life is so simple. A squirrel a day I enough for the whole family to eat. They don’t need a Kompressor or a Beemer.
Technology is applied to quest for food to survive, to multiply and to continue their generations. Unlike us, the “civilized” tribes use the best technology to kill each other.
To my disappointment though, I saw a set of Swiss Army knife hanging around one of the guys neck. They are not that purists after all. One thig for sure, it could be a damn good ad for Swiss Army knife manufacturer.
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