The migration from the ancestral cave

At a Glance

• Central figures: The first ancestors of the Ao Naga people - six men and six women who emerged from a stone called Lungterok at Chungliyimti, and the leaders among them who chose the direction of the migration.
• Setting: The Ao Naga homeland in present-day Nagaland, northeastern India; the journey begins at Chungliyimti (near modern Mokokchung district) and moves through the hills toward the founding of the first permanent Ao villages.
• The turn: The stone at Chungliyimti could not hold all the people emerging from it, and the ancestors had to leave the place of origin and walk into unknown hills to find land that could sustain them.
• The outcome: The Ao people divided into their founding clans and settled separate villages across the Naga hills, each carrying the memory of Lungterok as the common origin point that bound them despite their dispersion.
• The legacy: Lungterok - the six-sided stone at Chungliyimti - remains a sacred site for the Ao Naga, a physical anchor for clan identity, lineage reckoning, and the understanding that all Ao villages descend from one emergence.

The stone had six faces. Each face opened, and from each face a man and a woman stepped out, blinking, wet as if born. They stood on the hillside at Chungliyimti and looked at each other and did not yet have names for what they were. The stone behind them was called Lungterok. It did not close again. It sat there, open, finished with its work.

Twelve people on a hill with no village, no cleared field, no granary. Below them the jungle ran unbroken to the river. Above them the clouds sat on the ridge like something resting. One of the men picked up a stick and began to walk downhill. The others followed, because there was nowhere else to go.

Lungterok

The Ao elders say the stone is still there. It sits at Chungliyimti, and it has six faces, and if you put your hand on it you can feel that it is not ordinary rock. It is the womb-stone, the origin. Every Ao Naga person traces back to it. The six pairs who came out of it became the six founding tsingpho - the clans. Each clan took its identity from the face of the stone through which its ancestors emerged.

The stone did not explain anything. It did not speak. It produced the people and then it was done. What the people did next was their own problem.

At Chungliyimti they tried to stay. The hillside had water - a spring that came out between roots and ran clear into a pool. There were wild yams in the undergrowth and birds in the canopy and animals that had never seen a human being and therefore did not run. For a time the twelve lived off what the hill gave them.

But twelve became twenty, and twenty became fifty. Children were born and did not stop being born. The spring was enough for twelve. It was not enough for fifty. The yams thinned. The birds learned to fly at the sound of a footstep. The hill, which had seemed without limit, turned out to have edges.

The Argument at the Spring

The six men gathered at the spring one morning and disagreed. Three of them wanted to stay. Chungliyimti was the origin place; to leave it was to leave the stone, to break something that should not be broken. Three of them wanted to walk - north, south, wherever the hills opened into flatter ground where jhum could be cut and rice could grow.

The women were not consulted in the way the men understood consultation, but the women made their own decisions. Two of them had already been walking the ridgeline in the early mornings, looking at what lay beyond the next hill and the hill after that. They came back and said the land to the north was good. Heavy forest, yes, but the slopes faced the morning sun and the soil was dark and deep.

The argument lasted three days. On the third evening, one of the men who wanted to stay stood up and said a thing the Ao remember: The stone does not need us beside it. It already gave us what it had.

They left the next morning. All of them. Even the ones who had wanted to stay.

The Walk North

They did not walk as one group. The six clans separated on the second day, each taking a different ridge-path through the hills. This was not a quarrel. It was practical. Fifty people on a single trail strip the trail bare. Six groups of eight or nine, each following a different line through the jungle, could forage as they moved and arrive at the far end of the hills fed rather than starving.

They marked trees as they went. A blaze cut with a dao at shoulder height, the bark peeled back to show pale wood. The marks said: we passed here. If you are following, you are not lost.

The jungle was thick enough that a man standing ten paces off the trail was invisible. The undergrowth was waist-high fern and thorn bamboo and the broad wet leaves of wild taro. Leeches came off the ferns and found bare ankles. At night the groups built fires and slept around them, not for warmth - the hills were warm enough - but because fire kept the things in the jungle at a distance. They did not yet have names for all the things in the jungle. They would learn them later, in the villages, when there was time to name.

The Founding of the Villages

The first group to stop was the one that found a hilltop with a level clearing already on it, as if the forest had drawn back on its own. They cut bamboo and built the first house. Then they cut more forest and burned it and planted the first jhum field. Rice grew. It was enough.

The other groups found their own hilltops over the following weeks. Each clan settled a separate hill. Each hill became a village. The villages were close enough that a man could walk from one to the next in a day, but far enough that each had its own fields, its own water source, its own morung where the young men slept and learned the things young men needed to learn - how to fight, how to build, how to conduct a head-taking raid, how to sing the songs that kept the village in right relation with the spirits of the land.

Each village kept the name of its clan. Each clan kept the memory of its face of the stone. When two Ao met on a forest path and did not know each other, the first question was: which face? The answer placed them. It told them whether they were close kin or distant, whether they could marry or could not, whether the obligations between them were heavy or light.

The Stone That Stayed

The villages grew. Fields multiplied along the hillsides. Granaries filled. Warriors brought heads home and hung them in the morung and the village feasted. New generations were born who had never seen Chungliyimti and knew it only from what their grandparents told them.

But the stone was still there. It did not move. It did not erode. The jungle grew around it and over it and the path to it disappeared under fern, and still the Ao knew where it was. When a clan dispute could not be settled in the village, the elders walked back to Lungterok and stood beside it and spoke their case to the stone’s six open faces. The stone did not answer. It never had. But standing beside it, people remembered that they had come from the same place, and sometimes that was enough to end the argument.

The Ao say: we are a hill people because the stone was on a hill. We are a scattered people because the stone had six faces, not one. We came out separately but we came out of the same rock. That is the thing to remember. That is the thing we carry when we carry nothing else.