Research in recent years has shown that, very soon after first colonisation of Borneo in the Late Pleistocene, human hunter-gatherers engaged with a diverse suite of wild food plants. While groups such as the Penan still follow a hunter-gatherer lifestyle today, others had (and some still have) what some accounts have interpreted as Neolithic-style swidden agriculture at European contact. In the early years of the 20th Century, however, a more sophisticated observer, Lilian Gibbs, realised that alongside the agricultural systems instantly recognisable to westerners as farming, widespread rain-forest manipulation (‘arboriculture’) had been in place since 'time immemorial'. New evidence shows that the ‘Neolithic package’ in Borneo appears to have been a complex of intensively-managed indigenous plants, supplemented in coastal areas by imported species including domesticated rice very early in the Holocene.  It took several millennia for components of this ‘package’ to reach the interior of the island.