history

GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES Jared Diamond W. W. Norton & Company New York London CHAPTER 15 YALI'S PEOPLE W HEN MY WIFE, MARIE, AND I WERE VACATIONING IN Australia one summer, we decided to visit a site with well- preserved Aboriginal rock paintings in the desert near the town of Men- indee. While I knew of the Australian desert's reputation for dryness and summer heat, I had already spent long periods working under hot, dry conditions in the Californian desert and New Guinea savanna, so I consid­ ered myself experienced enough to deal with the minor challenges we would face as tourists in Australia. Carrying plenty of drinking water, Marie and I set off at noon on a hike of a few miles to the paintings. The trail from the ranger station led uphill, under a cloudless sky, through open terrain offering no shade whatsoever. The hot, dry air that we were breathing reminded me of how it had felt to breathe while sitting in a Finnish sauna. By the time we reached the cliff site with the paintings, we had finished our water. We had also lost our interest in art, so we pushed on uphill, breathing slowly and regularly. Presently I noticed a bird that was unmistakably a species of babbler, but it seemed enormous com­ pared with any known babbler species. At that point, I realized that I was experiencing heat hallucinations for the first time in my life. Marie and I decided that we had better head straight back. 296 GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL Both of us stopped talking. As we walked, we concentrated on listening to our breathing, calculating the distance to the next landmark, and esti­ mating the remaining time. My mouth and tongue were now dry, and Marie's face was red. When we at last reached the air-conditioned ranger station, we sagged into chairs next to the water cooler, drank down the cooler's last half-gallon of water, and asked the ranger for another bottle.

Sitting there exhausted, both physically and emotionally, I reflected that the Aborigines who had made those paintings had somehow spent their entire lives in that desert without air-conditioned retreats, managing to find food as well as water. To white Australians, Menindee is famous as the base camp for two whites who had suffered worse from the desert's dry heat over a century earlier: the Irish policeman Robert Burke and the English astronomer Wil­ liam Wills, ill-fated leaders of the first European expedition to cross Aus­ tralia from south to north. Setting out with six camels packing food enough for three months, Burke and Wills ran out of provisions while in the desert north of Menindee. Three successive times, they encountered and were rescued by well-fed Aborigines whose home was that desert, and who plied the explorers with fish, fern cakes, and roasted fat rats. But then Burke foolishly shot his pistol at one of the Aborigines, whereupon the whole group fled. Despite their big advantage over the Aborigines in pos­ sessing guns with which to hunt, Burke and Wills starved, collapsed, and died within a month after the Aborigines' departure. My wife's and my experience at Menindee, and the fate of Burke and Wills, made vivid for me the difficulties of building a human society in Australia. Australia stands out from all the other continents: the differ­ ences between Eurasia, Africa, North America, and South America fade into insignificance compared with the differences between Australia and any of those other landmasses. Australia is by far the driest, smallest, flat­ test, most infertile, climatically most unpredictable, and biologically most impoverished continent. It was the last continent to be occupied by Euro­ peans. Until then, it had supported the most distinctive human societies, and the least numerous human population, of any continent. Australia thus provides a crucial test of theories about intercontinental differences in societies. It had the most distinctive environment, and also the most distinctive societies. Did the former cause the latter? If so, how?

Australia is the logical continent with which to begin our around-the- YALI'S PEOPLE • 297 world tour, applying the lessons of Parts 2 and 3 to understanding the differing histories of all the continents.

MOST LAY PEOPLE WOULD describe as the most salient feature of Native Australian societies their seeming "backwardness." Australia is the sole continent where, in modern times, all native peoples still lived without any of the hallmarks of so-called civilization—without farming, herding, metal, bows and arrows, substantial buildings, settled villages, writing, chiefdoms, or states. Instead, Australian Aborigines were nomadic or seminomadic hunter-gatherers, organized into bands, living in temporary shelters or huts, and still dependent on stone tools. During the last 13,000 years less cultural change has accumulated in Australia than in any other continent. The prevalent European view of Native Australians was already typified by the words of an early French explorer, who wrote, "They are the most miserable people of the world, and the human beings who approach closest to brute beasts." Yet, as of 40,000 years ago, Native Australian societies enjoyed a big head start over societies of Europe and the other continents. Native Aus­ tralians developed some of the earliest known stone tools with ground edges, the earliest hafted stone tools (that is, stone ax heads mounted on handles), and by far the earliest watercraft, in the world. Some of the old­ est known painting on rock surfaces comes from Australia. Anatomically modern humans may have settled Australia before they settled western Europe. Why, despite that head start, did Europeans end up conquering Australia, rather than vice versa? Within that question lies another. During the Pleistocene Ice Ages, when much ocean water was sequestered in continental ice sheets and sea level dropped far below its present stand, the shallow Arafura Sea now separat­ ing Australia from New Guinea was low, dry land. With the melting of ice sheets between around 12,000 and 8,000 years ago, sea level rose, that low land became flooded, and the former continent of Greater Australia became sundered into the two hemi-continents of Australia and New Guinea (Figure 15.1 on page 299). The human societies of those two formerly joined landmasses were in modern times very different from each other. In contrast to everything that I just said about Native Australians, most New Guineans, such as Yali's 298 GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL people, were farmers and swineherds. They lived in settled villages and were organized politically into tribes rather than bands. All New Guineans had bows and arrows, and many used pottery. New Guineans tended to have much more substantial dwellings, more seaworthy boats, and more numerous and more varied utensils than did Australians. As a consequence of being food producers instead of hunter-gatherers, New Guineans lived at much higher average population densities than Australians: New Guinea has only one-tenth of Australia's area but supported a native popu­ lation several times that of Australia's. Why did the human societies of the larger landmass derived from Pleis­ tocene Greater Australia remain so "backward" in their development, while the societies of the smaller landmass "advanced" much more rap­ idly? Why didn't all those New Guinea innovations spread to Australia, which is separated from New Guinea by only 90 miles of sea at Torres Strait? From the perspective of cultural anthropology, the geographic dis­ tance between Australia and New Guinea is even less than 90 miles, because Torres Strait is sprinkled with islands inhabited by farmers using bows and arrows and culturally resembling New Guineans. The largest Torres Strait island lies only 10 miles from Australia. Islanders carried on a lively trade with Native Australians as well as with New Guineans. How could two such different cultural universes maintain themselves across a calm strait only 10 miles wide and routinely traversed by canoes? Compared with Native Australians, New Guineans rate as culturally "advanced." But most other modern people consider even New Guineans "backward." Until Europeans began to colonize New Guinea in the late 19th century, all New Guineans were nonliterate, dependent on stone tools, and politically not yet organized into states or (with few exceptions) chiefdoms. Granted that New Guineans had "progressed" beyond Native Australians, why had they not yet "progressed" as far as many Eurasians, Africans, and Native Americans? Thus, Yali's people and their Australian cousins pose a puzzle inside a puzzle. When asked to account for the cultural "backwardness" of Aboriginal Australian society, many white Australians have a simple answer: sup­ posed deficiencies of the Aborigines themselves. In facial structure and skin color, Aborigines certainly look different from Europeans, leading some late-19th century authors to consider them a missing link between apes and humans. How else can one account for the fact that white English colonists created a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy, within Figure 15.1. Map of the region from Southeast Asia to Australia and New Guinea. Solid lines denote the present coastline; the dashed lines are the coastline during Pleistocene times when sea level dropped to below its present stand—that is, the edge of the Asian and Greater Australian shelves. At that time, New Guinea and Australia were joined in an expanded Greater Australia, while Borneo, Java, Sumatra, and Taiwan were part of the Asian mainland. 300 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL a few decades of colonizing a continent whose inhabitants after more than 40,000 years were still nonliterate hunter-gatherers? It is especially strik­ ing that Australia has some of the world's richest iron and aluminum deposits, as well as rich reserves of copper, tin, lead, and zinc. Why, then, were Native Australians still ignorant of metal tools and living in the Stone Age? It seems like a perfectly controlled experiment in the evolution of human societies. The continent was the same; only the people were differ­ ent. Ergo, the explanation for the differences between Native Australian and European-Australian societies must lie in the different people compos­ ing them. The logic behind this racist conclusion appears compelling. We shall see, however, that it contains a simple error. THE FIRST step in examining this logic, let us examine the origins of the peoples themselves. Australia and New Guinea were both occupied by at least 40,000 years ago, at a time when they were both still joined as Greater Australia. A glance at a map (Figure 15.1) suggests that the colo­ nists must have originated ultimately from the nearest continent, Southeast Asia, by island hopping through the Indonesian Archipelago. This conclu­ sion is supported by genetic relationships between modern Australians, New Guineans, and Asians, and by the survival today of a few populations of somewhat similar physical appearance in the Philippines, Malay Penin­ sula, and Andaman Islands off Myanmar. Once the colonists had reached the shores of Greater Australia, they spread quickly over the whole continent to occupy even its farthest reaches and most inhospitable habitats. By 40,000 years ago, fossils and stone tools attest to their presence in Australia's southwestern corner; by 35,000 years ago, in Australia's southeastern corner and Tasmania, the corner of Australia most remote from the colonists' likely beachhead in western Aus­ tralia or New Guinea (the parts nearest Indonesia and Asia); and by 30,000 years ago, in the cold New Guinea highlands. All of those areas could have been reached overland from a western beachhead. However, the colonization of both the Bismarck and the Solomon Archipelagoes northeast of New Guinea, by 35,000 years ago, required further overwater crossings of dozens of miles. The occupation could have been even more rapid than that apparent spread of dates from 40,000 to 30,000 years ago, As YALI'S PEOPLE • 301 since the various dates hardly differ within the experimental error of the radiocarbon method. At the Pleistocene times when Australia and New Guinea were initially occupied, the Asian continent extended eastward to incorporate the mod­ ern islands of Borneo, Java, and Bali, nearly 1,000 miles nearer to Austra­ lia and New Guinea than Southeast Asia's present margin. However, at least eight channels up to 50 miles wide still remained to be crossed in getting from Borneo or Bali to Pleistocene Greater Australia. Forty thou­ sand years ago, those crossings may have been achieved by bamboo rafts, low-tech but seaworthy watercraft still in use in coastal South China today. The crossings must nevertheless have been difficult, because after that initial landfall by 40,000 years ago the archaeological record provides no compelling evidence of further human arrivals in Greater Australia from Asia for tens of thousands of years. Not until within the last few thousand years do we encounter the next firm evidence, in the form of the appearance of Asian-derived pigs in New Guinea and Asian-derived dogs in Australia. Thus, the human societies of Australia and New Guinea developed in substantial isolation from the Asian societies that founded them. That iso­ lation is reflected in languages spoken today. After all those millennia of isolation, neither modern Aboriginal Australian languages nor the major group of modern New Guinea languages (the so-called Papuan languages) exhibit any clear relationships with any modern Asian languages. The isolation is also reflected in genes and physical anthropology. Genetic studies suggest that Aboriginal Australians and New Guinea high- landers are somewhat more similar to modern Asians than to peoples of other continents, but the relationship is not a close one. In skeletons and physical appearance, Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans are also distinct from most Southeast Asian populations, as becomes obvious if one compares photos of Australians or New Guineans with those of Indone­ sians or Chinese. Part of the reason for all these differences is that the initial Asian colonists of Greater Australia have had a long time in which to diverge from their stay-at-home Asian cousins, with only limited genetic exchanges during most of that time. But probably a more important rea­ son is that the original Southeast Asian stock from which the colonists of Greater Australia were derived has by now been largely replaced by other Asians expanding out of China. 302 GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans have also diverged geneti­ cally, physically, and linguistically from each other. For instance, among the major (genetically determined) human blood groups, groups B of the so-called ABO system and S of the MNS system occur in New Guinea as well as in most of the rest of the world, but both are virtually absent in Australia. The tightly coiled hair of most New Guineans contrasts with the straight or wavy hair of most Australians. Australian languages and New Guinea's Papuan languages are unrelated not only to Asian languages but also to each other, except for some spread of vocabulary in both direc­ tions across Torres Strait. All that divergence of Australians and New Guineans from each other reflects lengthy isolation in very different environments. Since the rise of the Arafura Sea finally separated Australia and New Guinea from each other around 10,000 years ago, gene exchange has been limited to tenuous contact via the chain of Torres Strait islands. That has allowed the popula­ tions of the two hemi-continents to adapt to their own environments.

While the savannas and mangroves of coastal southern New Guinea are fairly similar to those of northern Australia, other habitats of the hemi- continents differ in almost all major respects. Here are some of the differences. New Guinea lies nearly on the equa­ tor, while Australia extends far into the temperate zones, reaching almost 40 degrees south of the equator. New Guinea is mountainous and extremely rugged, rising to 16,500 feet and with glaciers capping the high­ est peaks, while Australia is mostly low and flat—94 percent of its area lies below 2,000 feet of elevation. New Guinea is one of the wettest areas on Earth, Australia one of the driest. Most of New Guinea receives over 100 inches of rain annually, and much of the highlands receives over 200 inches, while most of Australia receives less than 20 inches. New Guinea's equatorial climate varies only modestly from season to season and year to year, but Australia's climate is highly seasonal and varies from year to year far more than that of any other continent. As a result, New Guinea is laced with permanent large rivers, while Australia's permanently flowing rivers are confined in most years to eastern Australia, and even Australia's largest river system (the Murray-Darling) has ceased flowing for months during droughts. Most of New Guinea's land area is clothed in dense rain forest, while most of Australia's supports only desert and open dry woodland. New Guinea is covered with young fertile soil, as a consequence of vol­ canic activity, glaciers repeatedly advancing and retreating and scouring YALI'S PEOPLE • 303 the highlands, and mountain streams carrying huge quantities of silt to the lowlands. In contrast, Australia has by far the oldest, most infertile, most nutrient-leached soils of any continent, because of Australia's little volcanic activity and its lack of high mountains and glaciers. Despite hav­ ing only one-tenth of Australia's area, New Guinea is home to approxi­ mately as many mammal and bird species as is Australia—a result of New Guinea's equatorial location, much higher rainfall, much greater range of elevations, and greater fertility. All of those environmental differences influenced the two hemi-continents' very disparate cultural histories, which we shall now consider.

THE EARLIEST AND most intensive food production, and the densest populations, of Greater Australia arose in the highland valleys of New Guinea at altitudes between 4,000 and 9,000 feet above sea level. Archae­ ological excavations uncovered complex systems of drainage ditches dat­ ing back to 9,000 years ago and becoming extensive by 6,000 years ago, as well as terraces serving to retain soil moisture in drier areas. The ditch systems were similar to those still used today in the highlands to drain swampy areas for use as gardens. By around 5,000 years ago, pollen analy­ ses testify to widespread deforestation of highland valleys, suggesting for­ est clearance for agriculture. Today, the staple crops of highland agriculture are the recently intro­ duced sweet potato, along with taro, bananas, yams, sugarcane, edible grass stems, and several leafy vegetables. Because taro, bananas, and yams are native to Southeast Asia, an undoubted site of plant domestication, it used to be assumed that New Guinea highland crops other than sweet potatoes arrived from Asia. However, it was eventually realized that the wild ancestors of sugarcane, the leafy vegetables, and the edible grass stems are New Guinea species, that the particular types of bananas grown in New Guinea have New Guinea rather than Asian wild ancestors, and that taro and some yams are native to New Guinea as well as to Asia. If New Guinea agriculture had really had Asian origins, one might have expected to find highland crops derived unequivocally from Asia, but there are none. For those reasons it is now generally acknowledged that agricul­ ture arose indigenously in the New Guinea highlands by domestication of New Guinea wild plant species. New Guinea thus joins the Fertile Crescent, China, and a few other 304 " GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL regions as one of the world's centers of independent origins of plant domestication. No remains of the crops actually being grown in the high­ lands 6,000 years ago have been preserved in archaeological sites. How­ ever, that is not surprising, because modern highland staple crops are plant species that do not leave archaeologically visible residues except under exceptional conditions. Hence it seems likely that some of them were also the founding crops of highland agriculture, especially as the ancient drain­ age systems preserved are so similar to the modern drainage systems used for growing taro. The three unequivocally foreign elements in New Guinea highland food production as seen by the first European explorers were chickens, pigs, and sweet potatoes. Chickens and pigs were domesticated in Southeast Asia and introduced around 3,600 years ago to New Guinea and most other Pacific islands by Austronesians, a people of ultimately South Chi­ nese origin whom we shall discuss in Chapter 17. (Pigs may have arrived earlier.) As for the sweet potato, native to South America, it apparently reached New Guinea only within the last few centuries, following its intro­ duction to the Philippines by Spaniards. Once established in New Guinea, the sweet potato overtook taro as the highland's leading crop, because of its shorter time required to reach maturity, higher yields per acre, and greater tolerance of poor soil conditions. The development of New Guinea highland agriculture must have trig­ gered a big population explosion thousands of years ago, because the high­ lands could have supported only very low population densities of hunter- gatherers after New Guinea's original megafauna of giant marsupials had been exterminated. The arrival of the sweet potato triggered a further explosion in recent centuries. When Europeans first flew over the high­ lands in the 1930s, they were astonished to see below them a landscape similar to Holland's. Broad valleys were completely deforested and dotted with villages, and drained and fenced fields for intensive food production covered entire valley floors. That landscape testifies to the population den­ sities achieved in the highlands by farmers with stone tools. Steep terrain, persistent cloud cover, malaria, and risk of drought at lower elevations confine New Guinea highland agriculture to elevations above about 4,000 feet. In effect, the New Guinea highlands are an island of dense farming populations thrust up into the sky and surrounded below by a sea of clouds. Lowland New Guineans on the seacoast and rivers are villagers depending heavily on fish, while those on dry ground away from YALI'S PEOPLE • 305 the coast and rivers subsist at low densities by slash-and-burn agriculture based on bananas and yams, supplemented by hunting and gathering. In contrast, lowland New Guinea swamp dwellers live as nomadic hunter- gatherers dependent on the starchy pith of wild sago palms, which are very productive and yield three times more calories per hour of work than does gardening. New Guinea swamps thus provide a clear instance of an envi­ ronment where people remained hunter-gatherers because farming could not compete with the hunting-gathering lifestyle. The sago eaters persisting in lowland swamps exemplify the nomadic hunter-gatherer band organization that must formerly have characterized all New Guineans. For all the reasons that we discussed in Chapters 13 and 14, the farmers and the fishing peoples were the ones to develop more- complex technology, societies, and political organization. They live in per­ manent villages and tribal societies, often led by a big-man. Some of them construct large, elaborately decorated, ceremonial houses. Their great art, in the form of wooden statues and masks, is prized in museums around the world.

NEW GUINEA THUS became the part of Greater Australia with the most-advanced technology, social and political organization, and art.

However, from an urban American or European perspective, New Guinea still rates as "primitive" rather than "advanced." Why did New Guineans continue to use stone tools instead of developing metal tools, remain non- literate, and fail to organize themselves into chiefdoms and states? It turns out that New Guinea had several biological and geographic strikes against it. First, although indigenous food production did arise in the New Guinea highlands, we saw in Chapter 8 that it yielded little protein. The dietary staples were low-protein root crops, and production of the sole domesti­ cated animal species (pigs and chickens) was too low to contribute much to people's protein budgets. Since neither pigs nor chickens can be har­ nessed to pull carts, highlanders remained without sources of power other than human muscle power, and also failed to evolve epidemic diseases to repel the eventual European invaders. A second restriction on the size of highland populations was the limited available area: the New Guinea highlands have only a few broad valleys, notably the Wahgi and Baliem Valleys, capable of supporting dense popu- 306 GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL lations. Still a third limitation was the reality that the mid-montane zone between 4,000 and 9,000 feet was the sole altitudinal zone in New Guinea suitable for intensive food production. There was no food production at all in New Guinea alpine habitats above 9,000 feet, little on the hillslopes between 4,000 and 1,000 feet, and only low-density slash-and-burn agri­ culture in the lowlands. Thus, large-scale economic exchanges of food, between communities at different altitudes specializing in different types of food production, never developed in New Guinea. Such exchanges in the Andes, Alps, and Himalayas not only increased population densities in those areas, by providing people at all altitudes with a more balanced diet, but also promoted regional economic and political integration. For all these reasons, the population of traditional New Guinea never exceeded 1,000,000 until European colonial governments brought West­ ern medicine and the end of intertribal warfare. Of the approximately nine world centers of agricultural origins that we discussed in Chapter 5, New Guinea remained the one with by far the smallest population. With a mere 1,000,000 people, New Guinea could not develop the technology, writing, and political systems that arose among populations of tens of millions in China, the Fertile Crescent, the Andes, and Mesoamerica. New Guinea's population is not only small in aggregate, but also frag­ mented into thousands of micropopulations by the rugged terrain: swamps in much of the lowlands, steep-sided ridges and narrow canyons alternat­ ing with each other in the highlands, and dense jungle swathing both the lowlands and the highlands. When I am engaged in biological exploration in New Guinea, with teams of New Guineans as field assistants, I consider excellent progress to be three miles per day even if we are traveling over existing trails. Most highlanders in traditional New Guinea never went more than 10 miles from home in the course of their lives. Those difficulties of terrain, combined with the state of intermittent warfare that characterized relations between New Guinea bands or vil­ lages, account for traditional New Guinea's linguistic, cultural, and politi­ cal fragmentation. New Guinea has by far the highest concentration of languages in the world: 1,000 out of the world's 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas, and divided into dozens of language families and isolated languages as different from each other as English is from Chinese. Nearly half of all New Guinea lan­ guages have fewer than 500 speakers, and even the largest language groups (still with a mere 100,000 speakers) were politically fragmented into hun- YALI'S PEOPLE " 307 dreds of villages, fighting as fiercely with each other as with speakers of other languages. Each of those microsocieties alone was far too small to support chiefs and craft specialists, or to develop metallurgy and writing. Besides a small and fragmented population, the other limitation on development in New Guinea was geographic isolation, restricting the inflow of technology and ideas from elsewhere. New Guinea's three neigh­ bors were all separated from New Guinea by water gaps, and until a few thousand years ago they were all even less advanced than New Guinea (especially the New Guinea highlands) in technology and food production.

Of those three neighbors, Aboriginal Australians remained hunter-gather­ ers with almost nothing to offer New Guineans that New Guineans did not already possess. New Guinea's second neighbor was the much smaller islands of the Bismarck and the Solomon Archipelagoes to the east. That left, as New Guinea's third neighbor, the islands of eastern Indonesia. But that area, too, remained a cultural backwater occupied by hunter-gather­ ers for most of its history. There is no item that can be identified as having reached New Guinea via Indonesia, after the initial colonization of New Guinea over 40,000 years ago, until the time of the Austronesian expan­ sion around 1600 B.C. With that expansion, Indonesia became occupied by food producers of Asian origins, with domestic animals, with agriculture and technology at least as complex as New Guinea's, and with navigational skills that served as a much more efficient conduit from Asia to New Guinea. Austronesians settled on islands west and north and east of New Guinea, and in the far west and on the north and southeast coasts of New Guinea itself. Aus­ tronesians introduced pottery, chickens, and probably dogs and pigs to New Guinea. (Early archaeological surveys claimed pig bones in the New Guinea highlands by 4000 B.C., but those claims have not been confirmed.) For at least the last thousand years, trade connected New Guinea to the technologically much more advanced societies of Java and China. In return for exporting bird of paradise plumes and spices, New Guineans received Southeast Asian goods, including even such luxury items as Dong Son bronze drums and Chinese porcelain. With time, the Austronesian expansion would surely have had more impact on New Guinea. Western New Guinea would eventually have been incorporated politically into the sultanates of eastern Indonesia, and metal tools might have spread through eastern Indonesia to New Guinea. But— that hadn't happened by A.D. 1511, the year the Portuguese arrived in the 308 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL Moluccas and truncated Indonesia's separate train of developments. When Europeans reached New Guinea soon thereafter, its inhabitants were still living in bands or in fiercely independent little villages, and still using stone tools.

WHILE THE NEW Guinea hemi-continent of Greater Australia thus developed both animal husbandry and agriculture, the Australian hemi¬ continent developed neither. During the Ice Ages Australia had supported even more big marsupials than New Guinea, including diprotodonts (the marsupial equivalent of cows and rhinoceroses), giant kangaroos, and giant wombats. But all those marsupial candidates for animal husbandry disappeared in the wave of extinctions (or exterminations) that accompa­ nied human colonization of Australia. That left Australia, like New Guinea, with no domesticable native mammals. The sole foreign domesti­ cated mammal adopted in Australia was the dog, which arrived from Asia (presumably in Austronesian canoes) around 1500 B.C. and established itself in the wild in Australia to become the dingo. Native Australians kept captive dingos as companions, watchdogs, and even as living blankets, giving rise to the expression "five-dog night" to mean a very cold night.

But they did not use dingos / dogs for food, as did Polynesians, or for coop­ erative hunting of wild animals, as did New Guineans. Agriculture was another nonstarter in Australia, which is not only the driest continent but also the one with the most infertile soils. In addition, Australia is unique in that the overwhelming influence on climate over most of the continent is an irregular nonannual cycle, the ENSO (acronym for El Nino Southern Oscillation), rather than the regular annual cycle of the seasons so familiar in most other parts of the world. Unpredictable severe droughts last for years, punctuated by equally unpredictable torren­ tial rains and floods. Even today, with Eurasian crops and with trucks and railroads to transport produce, food production in Australia remains a risky business. Herds build up in good years, only to be killed off by drought. Any incipient farmers in Aboriginal Australia would have faced similar cycles in their own populations. If in good years they had settled in villages, grown crops, and produced babies, those large populations would have starved and died off in drought years, when the land could support far fewer people. The other major obstacle to the development of food production in YALI'S PEOPLE • 309 Australia was the paucity of domesticable wild plants. Even modern Euro­ pean plant geneticists have failed to develop any crop except macadamia nuts from Australia's native wild flora. The list of the world's potential prize cereals—the 56 wild grass species with the heaviest grains—includes only two Australian species, both of which rank near the bottom of the list (grain weight only 13 milligrams, compared with a whopping 40 milli­ grams for the heaviest grains elsewhere in the world). That's not to say that Australia had no potential crops at all, or that Aboriginal Australians would never have developed indigenous food production. Some plants, such as certain species of yams, taro, and arrowroot, are cultivated in southern New Guinea but also grow wild in northern Australia and were gathered by Aborigines there. As we shall see, Aborigines in the climati­ cally most favorable areas of Australia were evolving in a direction that might have eventuated in food production. But any food production that did arise indigenously in Australia would have been limited by the lack of domesticable animals, the poverty of domesticable plants, and the difficult soils and climate. Nomadism, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and minimal investment in shelter and possessions were sensible adaptations to Australia's ENSO- driven resource unpredictability. When local conditions deteriorated, Abo­ rigines simply moved to an area where conditions were temporarily better.

Rather than depending on just a few crops that could fail, they minimized risk by developing an economy based on a great variety of wild foods, not all of which were likely to fail simultaneously. Instead of having fluctuating populations that periodically outran their resources and starved, they maintained smaller populations that enjoyed an abundance of food in good years and a sufficiency in bad years. The Aboriginal Australian substitute for food production has been termed "firestick farming." The Aborigines modified and managed the sur­ rounding landscape in ways that increased its production of edible plants and animals, without resorting to cultivation. In particular, they intention­ ally burned much of the landscape periodically. That served several pur­ poses: the fires drove out animals that could be killed and eaten immediately; fires converted dense thickets into open parkland in which people could travel more easily; the parkland was also an ideal habitat for kangaroos, Australia's prime game animal; and the fires stimulated the growth both of new grass on which kangaroos fed and of fern roots on which Aborigines themselves fed. 310 GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL We think of Australian Aborigines as desert people, but most of them were not. Instead, their population densities varied with rainfall (because it controls the production of terrestrial wild plant and animal foods) and with abundance of aquatic foods in the sea, rivers, and lakes. The highest population densities of Aborigines were in Australia's wettest and most productive regions: the Murray-Darling river system of the Southeast, the eastern and northern coasts, and the southwestern corner. Those areas also came to support the densest populations of European settlers in mod­ ern Australia. The reason we think of Aborigines as desert people is simply that Europeans killed or drove them out of the most desirable areas, leav­ ing the last intact Aboriginal populations only in areas that Europeans didn't want. Within the last 5,000 years, some of those productive regions witnessed an intensification of Aboriginal food-gathering methods, and a buildup of Aboriginal population density. Techniques were developed in eastern Australia for rendering abundant and starchy, but extremely poisonous, cycad seeds edible, by leaching out or fermenting the poison. The pre­ viously unexploited highlands of southeastern Australia began to be vis­ ited regularly during the summer, by Aborigines feasting not only on cycad nuts and yams but also on huge hibernating aggregations of a migratory moth called the bogong moth, which tastes like a roasted chestnut when grilled. Another type of intensified food-gathering activity that developed was the freshwater eel fisheries of the Murray-Darling river system, where water levels in marshes fluctuate with seasonal rains. Native Australians constructed elaborate systems of canals up to a mile and a half long, in order to enable eels to extend their range from one marsh to another. Eels were caught by equally elaborate weirs, traps set in dead-end side canals, and stone walls across canals with a net placed in an opening of the wall.

Traps at different levels in the marsh came into operation as the water level rose and fell. While the initial construction of those "fish farms" must have involved a lot of work, they then fed many people. Nineteenth-cen­ tury European observers found villages of a dozen Aboriginal houses at the eel farms, and there are archaeological remains of villages of up to 146 stone houses, implying at least seasonally resident populations of hundreds of people. Still another development in eastern and northern Australia was the harvesting of seeds of a wild millet, belonging to the same genus as the broomcorn millet that was a staple of early Chinese agriculture. The millet YALI'S PEOPLE • 311 was reaped with stone knives, piled into haystacks, and threshed to obtain the seeds, which were then stored in skin bags or wooden dishes and finally ground with millstones. Several of the tools used in this process, such as the stone reaping knives and grindstones, were similar to the tools inde­ pendently invented in the Fertile Crescent for processing seeds of other wild grasses. Of all the food-acquiring methods of Aboriginal Australians, millet harvesting is perhaps the one most likely to have evolved eventually into crop production. Along with intensified food gathering in the last 5,000 years came new types of tools. Small stone blades and points provided more length of sharp edge per pound of tool than the large stone tools they replaced.

Hatchets with ground stone edges, once present only locally in Australia, became widespread. Shell fishhooks appeared within the last thousand years.

WHY DID AUSTRALIA not develop metal tools, writing, and politically complex societies? A major reason is that Aborigines remained hunter- gatherers, whereas, as we saw in Chapters 12-14, those developments arose elsewhere only in populous and economically specialized societies of food producers. In addition, Australia's aridity, infertility, and climatic unpredictability limited its hunter-gatherer population to only a few hun­ dred thousand people. Compared with the tens of millions of people in ancient China or Mesoamerica, that meant that Australia had far fewer potential inventors, and far fewer societies to experiment with adopting innovations. Nor were its several hundred thousand people organized into closely interacting societies. Aboriginal Australia instead consisted of a sea of very sparsely populated desert separating several more productive eco­ logical "islands," each of them holding only a fraction of the continent's population and with interactions attenuated by the intervening distance.

Even within the relatively moist and productive eastern side of the conti­ nent, exchanges between societies were limited by the 1,900 miles from Queensland's tropical rain forests in the northeast to Victoria's temperate rain forests in the southeast, a geographic and ecological distance as great as that from Los Angeles to Alaska. Some apparent regional or continentwide regressions of technology in Australia may stem from the isolation and relatively few inhabitants of its population centers. The boomerang, that quintessential Australian 312. • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL weapon, was abandoned in the Cape York Peninsula of northeastern Aus­ tralia. When encountered by Europeans, the Aborigines of southwestern Australia did not eat shellfish. The function of the small stone points that appear in Australian archaeological sites around 5,000 years ago remains uncertain: while an easy explanation is that they may have been used as spearpoints and barbs, they are suspiciously similar to the stone points and barbs used on arrows elsewhere in the world. If they really were so used, the mystery of bows and arrows being present in modern New Guinea but absent in Australia might be compounded: perhaps bows and arrows actually were adopted for a while, then abandoned, across the Aus­ tralian continent. All these examples remind us of the abandonment of guns in Japan, of bows and arrows and pottery in most of Polynesia, and of other technologies in other isolated societies (Chapter 13). The most extreme losses of technology in the Australian region took place on the island of Tasmania, 130 miles off the coast of southeastern Australia. At Pleistocene times of low sea level, the shallow Bass Strait now separating Tasmania from Australia was dry land, and the people occupying Tasmania were part of the human population distributed con­ tinuously over an expanded Australian continent. When the strait was at last flooded around 10,000 years ago, Tasmanians and mainland Austra­ lians became cut off from each other because neither group possessed watercraft capable of negotiating Bass Strait. Thereafter, Tasmania's popu­ lation of 4,000 hunter-gatherers remained out of contact with all other humans on Earth, living in an isolation otherwise known only from science fiction novels. When finally encountered by Europeans in A.D. 1642, the Tasmanians had the simplest material culture of any people in the modern world. Like mainland Aborigines, they were hunter-gatherers without metal tools. But they also lacked many technologies and artifacts widespread on the main­ land, including barbed spears, bone tools of any type, boomerangs, ground or polished stone tools, hafted stone tools, hooks, nets, pronged spears, traps, and the practices of catching and eating fish, sewing, and starting a fire. Some of these technologies may have arrived or been invented in mainland Australia only after Tasmania became isolated, in which case we can conclude that the tiny Tasmanian population did not independently invent these technologies for itself. Others of these technologies were brought to Tasmania when it was still part of the Australian mainland, and were subsequently lost in Tasmania's cultural isolation. For example, YALI'S PEOPLE • 31 3 the Tasmanian archaeological record documents the disappearance of fishing, and of awls, needles, and other bone tools, around 1500 B.c. On at least three smaller islands (Flinders, Kangaroo, and King) that were iso­ lated from Australia or Tasmania by rising sea levels around 10,000 years ago, human populations that would initially have numbered around 200 to 400 died out completely. Tasmania and those three smaller islands thus illustrate in extreme form a conclusion of broad potential significance for world history. Human populations of only a few hundred people were unable to survive indefi­ nitely in complete isolation. A population of 4,000 was able to survive for 10,000 years, but with significant cultural losses and significant failures to invent, leaving it with a uniquely simplified material culture. Mainland Australia's 300,000 hunter-gatherers were more numerous and less iso­ lated than the Tasmanians but still constituted the smallest and most iso­ lated human population of any of the continents. The documented instances of technological regression on the Australian mainland, and the example of Tasmania, suggest that the limited repertoire of Native Austra­ lians compared with that of peoples of other continents may stem in part from the effects of isolation and population size on the development and maintenance of technology—like those effects on Tasmania, but less extreme. By implication, the same effects may have contributed to differ­ ences in technology between the largest continent (Eurasia) and the next smaller ones (Africa, North America, and South America).

WHY DIDN'T MORE-ADVANCED technology reach Australia from its neighbors, Indonesia and New Guinea? As regards Indonesia, it was sepa­ rated from northwestern Australia by water and was very different from it ecologically. In addition, Indonesia itself was a cultural and technological backwater until a few thousand years ago. There is no evidence of any new technology or introduction reaching Australia from Indonesia, after Australia's initial colonization 40,000 years ago, until the dingo appeared around 1500 B.C. The dingo reached Australia at the peak of the Austronesian expansion from South China through Indonesia. Austronesians succeeded in settling all the islands of Indonesia, including the two closest to Australia—Timor and Tanimbar (only 275 and 205 miles from modern Australia, respec­ tively). Since Austronesians covered far greater sea distances in the course 314 " GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL of their expansion across the Pacific, we would have to assume that they repeatedly reached Australia, even if we did not have the evidence of the dingo to prove it. In historical times northwestern Australia was visited each year by sailing canoes from the Macassar district on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi (Celebes), until the Australian government stopped the visits in 1907. Archaeological evidence traces the visits back until around A.D. 1000, and they may well have been going on earlier. The main pur­ pose of the visits was to obtain sea cucumbers (also known as beche-de- mer or trepang), starfish relatives exported from Macassar to China as a reputed aphrodisiac and prized ingredient of soups. Naturally, the trade that developed during the Macassans' annual visits left many legacies in northwestern Australia. The Macassans planted tam­ arind trees at their coastal campsites and sired children by Aboriginal women. Cloth, metal tools, pottery, and glass were brought as trade goods, though Aborigines never learned to manufacture those items themselves.

Aborigines did acquire from the Macassans some loan words, some cere­ monies, and the practices of using dugout sailing canoes and smoking tobacco in pipes. But none of these influences altered the basic character of Australian society. More important than what happened as a result of the Macassan visits is what did not happen. The Macassans did not settle in Australia— undoubtedly because the area of northwestern Australia facing Indonesia is much too dry for Macassan agriculture. Had Indonesia faced the tropi­ cal rain forests and savannas of northeastern Australia, the Macassans could have settled, but there is no evidence that they ever traveled that far.

Since the Macassans thus came only in small numbers and for temporary visits and never penetrated inland, just a few groups of Australians on a small stretch of coast were exposed to them. Even those few Australians got to see only a fraction of Macassan culture and technology, rather than a full Macassan society with rice fields, pigs, villages, and work­ shops. Because the Australians remained nomadic hunter-gatherers, they acquired only those few Macassan products and practices compatible with their lifestyle. Dugout sailing canoes and pipes, yes; forges and pigs, no. Apparently much more astonishing than Australians' resistance to Indo­ nesian influence is their resistance to New Guinea influence. Across the narrow ribbon of water known as Torres Strait, New Guinea farmers who spoke New Guinea languages and had pigs, pottery, and bows and arrows faced Australian hunter-gatherers who spoke Australian languages and YALI'S PEOPLE » 315 lacked pigs, pottery, and bows and arrows. Furthermore, the strait is not an open-water barrier but is dotted with a chain of islands, of which the largest (Muralug Island) lies only 10 miles from the Australian coast.

There were regular trading visits between Australia and the islands, and between the islands and New Guinea. Many Aboriginal women came as wives to Muralug Island, where they saw gardens and bows and arrows.

How was it that those New Guinea traits did not get transmitted to Aus­ tralia? This cultural barrier at Torres Strait is astonishing only because we may mislead ourselves into picturing a full-fledged New Guinea society with intensive agriculture and pigs 10 miles off the Australian coast. In reality, Cape York Aborigines never saw a mainland New Guinean. Instead, there was trade between New Guinea and the islands nearest New Guinea, then between those islands and Mabuiag Island halfway down the strait, then between Mabuiag Island and Badu Island farther down the strait, then between Badu Island and Muralug Island, and finally between Muralug and Cape York. New Guinea society became attenuated along that island chain. Pigs were rare or absent on the islands. Lowland South New Guineans along Torres Strait practiced not the intensive agriculture of the New Guinea highlands but a slash-and-burn agriculture with heavy reliance on sea­ foods, hunting, and gathering. The importance of even those slash-and- burn practices decreased from southern New Guinea toward Australia along the island chain. Muralug Island itself, the island nearest Australia, was dry, marginal for agriculture, and supported only a small human pop­ ulation, which subsisted mainly on seafood, wild yams, and mangrove fruits. The interface between New Guinea and Australia across Torres Strait was thus reminiscent of the children's game of telephone, in which children sit in a circle, one child whispers a word into the ear of the second child, who whispers what she thinks she has just heard to the third child, and the word finally whispered by the last child back to the first child bears no resemblance to the initial word. In the same way, trade along the Torres Strait islands was a telephone game that finally presented Cape York Abo­ rigines with something very different from New Guinea society. In addi­ tion, we should not imagine that relations between Muralug Islanders and Cape York Aborigines were an uninterrupted love feast at which Aborigi­ nes eagerly sopped up culture from island teachers. Trade instead alter- 316 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL nated with war for the purposes of head-hunting and capturing women to become wives. Despite the dilution of New Guinea culture by distance and war, some New Guinea influence did manage to reach Australia. Intermarriage car­ ried New Guinea physical features, such as coiled rather than straight hair, down the Cape York Peninsula. Four Cape York languages had phonemes unusual for Australia, possibly because of the influence of New Guinea languages. The most important transmissions were of New Guinea shell fishhooks, which spread far into Australia, and of New Guinea outrigger canoes, which spread down the Cape York Peninsula. New Guinea drums, ceremonial masks, funeral posts, and pipes were also adopted on Cape York. But Cape York Aborigines did not adopt agriculture, in part because what they saw of it on Muralug Island was so watered-down. They did not adopt pigs, of which there were few or none on the islands, and which they would in any case have been unable to feed without agriculture. Nor did they adopt bows and arrows, remaining instead with their spears and spear-throwers. Australia is big, and so is New Guinea. But contact between those two big landmasses was restricted to those few small groups of Torres Strait islanders with a highly attenuated New Guinea culture, interacting with those few small groups of Cape York Aborigines. The latter groups' deci­ sions, for whatever reason, to use spears rather than bows and arrows, and not to adopt certain other features of the diluted New Guinea culture they saw, blocked transmission of those New Guinea cultural traits to all the rest of Australia. As a result, no New Guinea trait except shell fish­ hooks spread far into Australia. If the hundreds of thousands of farmers in the cool New Guinea highlands had been in close contact with the Abo­ rigines in the cool highlands of southeastern Australia, a massive transfer of intensive food production and New Guinea culture to Australia might have followed. But the New Guinea highlands are separated from the Aus­ tralian highlands by 2,000 miles of ecologically very different landscape.

The New Guinea highlands might as well have been the mountains of the moon, as far as Australians' chances of observing and adopting New Guinea highland practices were concerned. In short, the persistence of Stone Age nomadic hunter-gatherers in Aus­ tralia, trading with Stone Age New Guinea farmers and Iron Age Indone­ sian farmers, at first seems to suggest singular obstinacy on the part of Native Australians. On closer examination, it merely proves to reflect the YALI'S PEOPLE " 317 ubiquitous role of geography in the transmission of human culture and technology.

IT REMAINS FOR US to consider the encounters of New Guinea's and Australia's Stone Age societies with Iron Age Europeans. A Portuguese navigator "discovered" New Guinea in 1526, Holland claimed the west­ ern half in 1828, and Britain and Germany divided the eastern half in 1884. The first Europeans settled on the coast, and it took them a long time to penetrate into the interior, but by 1960 European governments had established political control over most New Guineans. The reasons that Europeans colonized New Guinea, rather than vice versa, are obvious. Europeans were the ones who had the oceangoing ships and compasses to travel to New Guinea; the writing systems and printing presses to produce maps, descriptive accounts, and administrative paperwork useful in establishing control over New Guinea; the political institutions to organize the ships, soldiers, and administration; and the guns to shoot New Guineans who resisted with bow and arrow and clubs.

Yet the number of European settlers was always very small, and today New Guinea is still populated largely by New Guineans. That contrasts sharply with the situation in Australia, the Americas, and South Africa, where European settlement was numerous and lasting and replaced the original native population over large areas. Why was New Guinea dif­ ferent? A major factor was the one that defeated all European attempts to settle the New Guinea lowlands until the 1880s: malaria and other tropical dis­ eases, none of them an acute epidemic crowd infection as discussed in Chapter 11. The most ambitious of those failed lowland settlement plans, organized by the French marquis de Rays around 1880 on the nearby island of New Ireland, ended with 930 out of the 1,000 colonists dead within three years. Even with modern medical treatments available today, many of my American and European friends in New Guinea have been forced to leave because of malaria, hepatitis, or other diseases, while my own health legacy of New Guinea has been a year of malaria and a year of dysentery. As Europeans were being felled by New Guinea lowland germs, why were Eurasian germs not simultaneously felling New Guineans? Some New Guineans did become infected, but not on the massive scale that 318 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL killed off most of the native peoples of Australia and the Americas. One lucky break for New Guineans was that there were no permanent Euro­ pean settlements in New Guinea until the 1880s, by which time public health discoveries had made progress in bringing smallpox and other infec­ tious diseases of European populations under control. In addition, the Austronesian expansion had already been bringing a stream of Indonesian settlers and traders to New Guinea for 3,500 years. Since Asian mainland infectious diseases were well established in Indonesia, New Guineans thereby gained long exposure and built up much more resistance to Eur­ asian germs than did Aboriginal Australians. The sole part of New Guinea where Europeans do not suffer from severe health problems is the highlands, above the altitudinal ceiling for malaria. But the highlands, already occupied by dense populations of New Guineans, were not reached by Europeans until the 1930s. By then, the Australian and Dutch colonial governments were no longer willing to open up lands for white settlement by killing native people in large numbers or driving them off their lands, as had happened during earlier centuries of European colonialism. The remaining obstacle to European would-be settlers was that Euro­ pean crops, livestock, and subsistence methods do poorly everywhere in the New Guinea environment and climate. While introduced tropical American crops such as squash, corn, and tomatoes are now grown in small quantities, and tea and coffee plantations have been established in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, staple European crops, like wheat, barley, and peas, have never taken hold. Introduced cattle and goats, kept in small numbers, suffer from tropical diseases, just as do European people themselves. Food production in New Guinea is still dominated by the crops and agricultural methods that New Guineans perfected over the course of thousands of years. All those problems of disease, rugged terrain, and subsistence contrib­ uted to Europeans' leaving eastern New Guinea (now the independent nation of Papua New Guinea) occupied and governed by New Guineans, who nevertheless use English as their official language, write with the alphabet, live under democratic governmental institutions modeled on those of England, and use guns manufactured overseas. The outcome was different in western New Guinea, which Indonesia took over from Hol­ land in 1963 and renamed Irian Jaya province. The province is now gov­ erned by Indonesians, for Indonesians. Its rural population is still YALI'S PEOPLE • 319 overwhelmingly New Guinean, but its urban population is Indonesian, as a result of government policy aimed at encouraging Indonesian immigra­ tion. Indonesians, with their long history of exposure to malaria and other tropical diseases shared with New Guineans, have not faced as potent a germ barrier as have Europeans. They are also better prepared than Euro­ peans for subsisting in New Guinea, because Indonesian agriculture already included bananas, sweet potatoes, and some other staple crops of New Guinea agriculture. The ongoing changes in Irian Jaya represent the continuation, backed by a centralized government's full resources, of the Austronesian expansion that began to reach New Guinea 3,500 years ago.

Indonesians are modern Austronesians.

EUROPEANS COLONIZED AUSTRALIA, rather than Native Australians colonizing Europe, for the same reasons that we have just seen in the case of New Guinea. However, the fates of New Guineans and of Aboriginal Australians were very different. Today, Australia is populated and gov­ erned by 20 million non-Aborigines, most of them of European descent, plus increasing numbers of Asians arriving since Australia abandoned its previous White Australia immigration policy in 1973. The Aboriginal pop­ ulation declined by 80 percent, from around 300,000 at the time of Euro­ pean settlement to a minimum of 60,000 in 1921. Aborigines today form an underclass of Australian society. Many of them live on mission stations or government reserves, or else work for whites as herdsmen on cattle stations. Why did Aborigines fare so much worse than New Guineans? The basic reason is Australia's suitability (in some areas) for European food production and settlement, combined with the role of European guns, germs, and steel in clearing Aborigines out of the way. While I already stressed the difficulties posed by Australia's climate and soils, its most pro­ ductive or fertile areas can nevertheless support European farming. Agri­ culture in the Australian temperate zone is now dominated by the Eurasian temperate-zone staple crops of wheat (Australia's leading crop), barley, oats, apples, and grapes, along with sorghum and cotton of African Sahel origins and potatoes of Andean origins. In tropical areas of northeastern Australia (Queensland) beyond the optimal range of Fertile Crescent crops, European farmers introduced sugarcane of New Guinea origins, bananas and citrus fruit of tropical Southeast Asian origins, and peanuts of tropical South American origins. As for livestock, Eurasian sheep made 320 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL it possible to extend food production to arid areas of Australia unsuitable for agriculture, and Eurasian cattle joined crops in moister areas. Thus, the development of food production in Australia had to await the arrival of non-native crops and animals domesticated in climatically simi­ lar parts of the world too remote for their domesticates to reach Australia until brought by transoceanic shipping. Unlike New Guinea, most of Aus­ tralia lacked diseases serious enough to keep out Europeans. Only in tropi­ cal northern Australia did malaria and other tropical diseases force Europeans to abandon their 19th-century attempts at settlement, which succeeded only with the development of 20th-century medicine. Australian Aborigines, of course, stood in the way of European food production, especially because what was potentially the most productive farmland and dairy country initially supported Australia's densest popula­ tions of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers. European settlement reduced the number of Aborigines by two means. One involved shooting them, an option that Europeans considered more acceptable in the 19th and late 18th centuries than when they entered the New Guinea highlands in the 1930s. The last large-scale massacre, of 31 Aborigines, occurred at Alice Springs in 1928. The other means involved European-introduced germs to which Aborigines had had no opportunity to acquire immunity or to evolve genetic resistance. Within a year of the first European settlers' arrival at Sydney, in 1788, corpses of Aborigines who had died in epidem­ ics became a common sight. The principal recorded killers were smallpox, influenza, measles, typhoid, typhus, chicken pox, whooping cough, tuber­ culosis, and syphilis. In these two ways, independent Aboriginal societies were eliminated in all areas suitable for European food production. The only societies that survived more or less intact were those in areas of northern and western Australia useless to Europeans. Within one century of European coloniza­ tion, 40,000 years of Aboriginal traditions had been mostly swept away.

WE CAN NOW return to the problem that I posed near the beginning of this chapter. How, except by postulating deficiencies in the Aborigines themselves, can one account for the fact that white English colonists apparently created a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy, within a few decades of colonizing a continent whose inhabitants after more than 40,000 years were still nonliterate nomadic hunter-gatherers? Doesn't that YALI'S PEOPLE • 3 2 I constitute a perfectly controlled experiment in the evolution of human societies, forcing us to a simple racist conclusion? The resolution of this problem is simple. White English colonists did not create a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy in Australia.

Instead, they imported all of the elements from outside Australia: the live­ stock, all of the crops (except macadamia nuts), the metallurgical knowl­ edge, the steam engines, the guns, the alphabet, the political institutions, even the germs. All these were the end products of 10,000 years of devel­ opment in Eurasian environments. By an accident of geography, the colo­ nists who landed at Sydney in 1788 inherited those elements. Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology. Robert Burke and William Wills were smart enough to write, but not smart enough to survive in Australian desert regions where Aborigines were living. The people who did create a society in Australia were Aboriginal Aus­ tralians. Of course, the society that they created was not a literate, food- producing, industrial democracy. The reasons follow straightforwardly from features of the Australian environment. CHAPTER 16 How CHINA BECAME CHINESE I MMIGRATION, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, MULTILINGUALISM, ethnic diversity—my state of California was among the pioneers of these controversial policies and is now pioneering a backlash against them.

A glance into the classrooms of the Los Angeles public school system, where my sons are being educated, fleshes out the abstract debates with the faces of children. Those children represent over 80 languages spoken in the home, with English-speaking whites in the minority. Every single one of my sons' playmates has at least one parent or grandparent who was born outside the United States; that's true of three of my own sons' four grandparents. But immigration is merely restoring the diversity that America held for thousands of years. Before European settlement, the mainland United States was home to hundreds of Native American tribes and languages and came under control of a single government only within the last hundred years. In these respects the United States is a thoroughly "normal" country. All but one of the world's six most populous nations are melting pots that achieved political unification recently, and that still support hundreds of languages and ethnic groups. For example, Russia, once a small Slavic state centered on Moscow, did not even begin its expansion beyond the Ural Mountains until A.D. 1582. From then until the 19th century, Russia HOW CHINA BECAME CHINESE • 323 proceeded to swallow up dozens of non-Slavic peoples, many of which retain their original language and cultural identity. Just as American his­ tory is the story of how our continent's expanse became American, Rus­ sia's history is the story of how Russia became Russian. India, Indonesia, and Brazil are also recent political creations (or re-creations, in the case of India), home to about 850, 670, and 210 languages, respectively. The great exception to this rule of the recent melting pot is the world's most populous nation, China. Today, China appears politically, culturally, and linguistically monolithic, at least to laypeople. It was already unified politically in 221 B.C. and has remained so for most of the centuries since then. From the beginnings of literacy in China, it has had only a single writing system, whereas modern Europe uses dozens of modified alpha­ bets. Of China's 1.2 billion people, over 800 million speak Mandarin, the language with by far the largest number of native speakers in the world.

Some 300 million others speak seven other languages as similar to Manda­ rin, and to each other, as Spanish is to Italian. Thus, not only is China not a melting pot, but it seems absurd to ask how China became Chinese.

China has been Chinese, almost from the beginnings of its recorded his­ tory. We take this seeming unity of China so much for granted that we forget how astonishing it is. One reason why we should not have expected such unity is genetic. While a coarse racial classification of world peoples lumps all Chinese people as so-called Mongoloids, that category conceals much more variation than the differences between Swedes, Italians, and Irish within Europe. In particular, North and South Chinese are genetically and physically rather different: North Chinese are most similar to Tibetans and Nepalese, while South Chinese are similar to Vietnamese and Filipinos.

My North and South Chinese friends can often distinguish each other at a glance by physical appearance: the North Chinese tend to be taller, heav­ ier, paler, with more pointed noses, and with smaller eyes that appear more "slanted" (because of what is termed their epicanthic fold). North and South China differ in environment and climate as well: the north is drier and colder; the south, wetter and hotter. Genetic differences arising in those differing environments imply a long history of moderate isolation between peoples of North and South China. How did those peo­ ples nevertheless end up with the same or very similar languages and cul­ tures? China's apparent linguistic near-unity is also puzzling in view of the 324 " GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL linguistic disunity of other long-settled parts of the world. For instance, we saw in the last chapter that New Guinea, with less than one-tenth of China's area and with only about 40,000 years of human history, has a thousand languages, including dozens of language groups whose differ­ ences are far greater than those among the eight main Chinese languages.

Western Europe has evolved or acquired about 40 languages just in the 6,000-8,000 years since the arrival of Indo-European languages, including languages as different as English, Finnish, and Russian. Yet fossils attest to human presence in China for over half a million years. What happened to the tens of thousands of distinct languages that must have arisen in China over that long time span? These paradoxes hint that China too was once diverse, as all other pop­ ulous nations still are. China differs only by having been unified much earlier. Its "Sinification" involved the drastic homogenization of a huge region in an ancient melting pot, the repopulation of tropical Southeast Asia, and the exertion of a massive influence on Japan, Korea, and possibly even India. Hence the history of China offers the key to the history of all of East Asia. This chapter will tell the story of how China did become Chinese.

A CONVENIENT STARTING point is a detailed linguistic map of China (see Figure 16.1). A glance at it is an eye-opener to all of us accustomed to thinking of China as monolithic. It turns out that, in addition to China's eight "big" languages—Mandarin and its seven close relatives (often referred to collectively simply as "Chinese"), with between 11 million and 800 million speakers each—China also has over 130 "little" languages, many of them with just a few thousand speakers. All these languages, "big" and "little," fall into four language families, which differ greatly in the compactness of their distributions. At the one extreme, Mandarin and its relatives, which constitute the Chinese subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan language family, are distributed continuously from North to South China. One could walk through China, from Manchuria in the north to the Gulf of Tonkin in the south, while remaining entirely within land occupied by native speakers of Mandarin and its relatives. The other three families have fragmented distributions, being spoken by "islands" of people surrounded by a "sea" of speakers of Chinese and other language families. HOW CHINA BECAME CHINESE • 325 Especially fragmented is the distribution of the Miao-Yao (alias Hmong-Mien) family, which consists of 6 million speakers divided among about five languages, bearing the colorful names of Red Miao, White Miao (alias Striped Miao), Black Miao, Green Miao (alias Blue Miao), and Yao.

Miao-Yao speakers live in dozens of small enclaves, all surrounded by speakers of other language families and scattered over an area of half a million square miles, extending from South China to Thailand. More than 100,000 Miao-speaking refugees from Vietnam have carried this language family to the United States, where they are better known under the alterna­ tive name of Hmong. Another fragmented language group is the Austroasiatic family, whose most widely spoken languages are Vietnamese and Cambodian. The 60 million Austroasiatic speakers are scattered from Vietnam in the east to the Malay Peninsula in the south and to northern India in the west. The fourth and last of China's language families is the Tai-Kadai family (including Thai and Lao), whose 50 million speakers are distributed from South China southward into Peninsular Thailand and west to Myanmar (Figure 16.1). Naturally, Miao-Yao speakers did not acquire their current fragmented distribution as a result of ancient helicopter flights that dropped them here and there over the Asian landscape. Instead, one might guess that they once had a more nearly continuous distribution, which became frag­ mented as speakers of other language families expanded or induced Miao- Yao speakers to abandon their tongues. In fact, much of that process of linguistic fragmentation occurred within the past 2,500 years and is well documented historically. The ancestors of modern speakers of Thai, Lao, and Burmese all moved south from South China and adjacent areas to their present locations within historical times, successively inundating the settled descendants of previous migrations. Speakers of Chinese languages were especially vigorous in replacing and linguistically converting other ethnic groups, whom Chinese speakers looked down upon as primitive and inferior. The recorded history of China's Zhou Dynasty, from 1100 to 221 B.c., describes the conquest and absorption of most of China's non- Chinese-speaking population by Chinese-speaking states. We can use several types of reasoning to try to reconstruct the linguistic map of East Asia as of several thousand years ago. First, we can reverse the historically known linguistic expansions of recent millennia. Second, we can reason that modern areas with just a single language or related Figure 16.1. The four language families of China and Southeast Asia. HOW CHINA BECAME CHINESE • 327 Figure 16.2. Modern political borders in East and Southeast Asia, for use in interpreting the distributions of language families shown in Figure 16.1. 328 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL language group occupying a large, continuous area testify to a recent geo­ graphic expansion of that group, such that not enough historical time has elapsed for it to differentiate into many languages. Finally, we can reason conversely that modern areas with a high diversity of languages within a given language family lie closer to the early center of distribution of that language family. Using those three types of reasoning to turn back the linguistic clock, we conclude that North China was originally occupied by speakers of Chi­ nese and other Sino-Tibetan languages; that different parts of South China were variously occupied by speakers of Miao-Yao, Austroasiatic, and Tai- Kadai languages; and that Sino-Tibetan speakers have replaced most speakers of those other families over South China. An even more drastic linguistic upheaval must have swept over tropical Southeast Asia to the south of China—in Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Peninsular Malaysia. Whatever languages were originally spoken there must now be entirely extinct, because all of the modern languages of those countries appear to be recent invaders, mainly from South China or, in a few cases, from Indonesia. Since Miao-Yao languages barely survived into the present, we might also guess that South China once harbored still other language families besides Miao-Yao, Austroasiatic, and Tai-Kadai, but that those other families left no modern surviving languages. As we shall see, the Austronesian language family (to which all Philippine and Polyne­ sian languages belong) may have been one of those other families that vanished from the Chinese mainland, and that we know only because it spread to Pacific islands and survived there. These language replacements in East Asia remind us of the spread of European languages, especially English and Spanish, into the New World, formerly home to a thousand or more Native American languages. We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S.

Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears.

Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.

The immediate causes of that language replacement were the advantages in technology and political organization, stemming ultimately from the advantage of an early rise of food production, that invading Europeans held over Native Americans. Essentially the same processes accounted for the replacement of Aboriginal Australian languages by English, and of HOW CHINA BECAME CHINESE • 329 subequatorial Africa's original Pygmy and Khoisan languages by Bantu languages. Hence East Asia's linguistic upheavals raise a corresponding question: what enabled Sino-Tibetan speakers to spread from North China to South China, and speakers of Austroasiatic and the other original South China language families to spread south into tropical Southeast Asia? Here, we must turn to archaeology for evidence of the technological, political, and agricultural advantages that some Asians evidently gained over other Asians.

As EVERYWHERE ELSE in the world, the archaeological record in East Asia for most of human history reveals only the debris of hunter-gatherers using unpolished stone tools and lacking pottery. The first East Asian evi­ dence for something different comes from China, where crop remains, bones of domestic animals, pottery, and polished (Neolithic) stone tools appear by around 7500 B.C. That date is within a thousand years of the beginning of the Neolithic Age and food production in the Fertile Cres­ cent. But because the previous millennium in China is poorly known archaeologically, one cannot decide at present whether the origins of Chi­ nese food production were contemporaneous with those in the Fertile Crescent, slightly earlier, or slightly later. At the least, we can say that China was one of the world's first centers of plant and animal domestica­ tion. China may actually have encompassed two or more independent centers of origins of food production. I already mentioned the ecological differ­ ences between China's cool, dry north and warm, wet south. At a given latitude, there are also ecological distinctions between the coastal lowlands and the interior uplands. Different wild plants are native to these disparate environments and would thus have been variously available to incipient farmers in various parts of China. In fact, the earliest identified crops were two drought-resistant species of millet in North China, but rice in South China, suggesting the possibility of separate northern and southern centers of plant domestication. Chinese sites with the earliest evidence of crops also contained bones of domestic pigs, dogs, and chickens. These domestic animals and crops were gradually joined by China's many other domesticates. Among the animals, water buffalo were most important (for pulling plows), while silkworms, 330 ' GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL ducks, and geese were others. Familiar later Chinese crops include soy­ beans, hemp, citrus fruit, tea, apricots, peaches, and pears. In addition, just as Eurasia's east-west axis permitted many of these Chinese animals and crops to spread westward in ancient times, West Asian domesticates also spread eastward to China and became important there. Especially sig­ nificant western contributions to ancient China's economy have been wheat and barley, cows and horses, and (to a lesser extent) sheep and goats. As elsewhere in the world, in China food production gradually led to the other hallmarks of "civilization" discussed in Chapters 11-14. A superb Chinese tradition of bronze metallurgy had its origins in the third millennium B.c. and eventually resulted in China's developing by far the earliest cast-iron production in the world, around 500 B.C. The following 1,500 years saw the outpouring of Chinese technological inventions, men­ tioned in Chapter 13, that included paper, the compass, the wheelbarrow, and gunpowder. Fortified towns emerged in the third millennium B.C., with cemeteries whose great variation between unadorned and luxuriously furnished graves bespeaks emerging class differences. Stratified societies whose rulers could mobilize large labor forces of commoners are also attested by huge urban defensive walls, big palaces, and eventually the Grand Canal (the world's longest canal, over 1,000 miles long), linking North and South China. Writing is preserved from the second millennium B.C. but probably arose earlier. Our archaeological knowledge of China's emerging cities and states then becomes supplemented by written accounts of China's first dynasties, going back to the Xia Dynasty, which arose around 2000 B.C. As for food production's more sinister by-product of infectious diseases, we cannot specify where within the Old World most major diseases of Old World origin arose. However, European writings from Roman and medieval times clearly describe the arrival of bubonic plague and possibly smallpox from the east, so these germs could be of Chinese or East Asian origin. Influenza (derived from pigs) is even more likely to have arisen in China, since pigs were domesticated so early and became so important there. China's size and ecological diversity spawned many separate local cul­ tures, distinguishable archaeologically by their differing styles of pottery and artifacts. In the fourth millennium B.C. those local cultures expanded geographically and began to interact, compete with each other, and HOW CHINA BECAME CHINESE -331 coalesce, just as exchanges of domesticates between ecologically diverse regions enriched Chinese food production, exchanges between culturally diverse regions enriched Chinese culture and technology, and fierce compe­ tition between warring chiefdoms drove the formation of ever larger and more centralized states (Chapter 14). While China's north-south gradient retarded crop diffusion, the gradi­ ent was less of a barrier there than in the Americas or Africa, because China's north-south distances were smaller; and because China's is tran­ sected neither by desert, as is Africa and northern Mexico, nor by a narrow isthmus as is Central America. Instead, China's long east-west rivers (the Yellow River in the north, the Yangtze River in the south) facilitated diffu­ sion of crops and technology between the coast and inland, while its broad east-west expanse and relatively gentle terrain, which eventually permitted those two river systems to be joined by canals, facilitated north-south exchanges. All these geographic factors contributed to the early cultural and political unification of China, whereas western Europe, with a similar area but a more rugged terrain and no such unifying rivers, has resisted cultural and political unification to this day. Some developments spread from south to north in China, especially iron smelting and rice cultivation. But the predominant direction of spread was from north to south. That trend is clearest for writing: in contrast to western Eurasia, which produced a plethora of early writing systems, such as Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Hittite, Minoan, and the Semitic alphabet, China developed just a single well-attested writing sys­ tem. It was perfected in North China, spread and preempted or replaced any other nascent system, and evolved into the writing still used in China today. Other major features of North Chinese societies that spread south­ ward were bronze technology, Sino-Tibetan languages, and state forma- tion. All three of China's first three dynasties, the Xia and Shang and Zhou Dynasties, arose in North China in the second millennium B C Preserved writings of the first millennium B.C. show that ethnic Chinese already tended then (as many still do today) to feel culturally superior to non-Chinese barbarians," while North Chinese tended to regard even South Chinese as barbarians. For example, a late Zhou Dynasty writer of the first millennium B.C. described China's other peoples as follows: "The people of those five regions-the Middle states and the Rong, Yi, and other wild tribes around them-had all their several natures, which they could not be made to alter. The tribes on the east were called Yi. They had their 332. • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL hair unbound, and tattooed their bodies. Some of them ate their food with­ out its being cooked by fire." The Zhou author went on to describe wild tribes to the south, west, and north as indulging in equally barbaric prac­ tices, such as turning their feet inward, tattooing their foreheads, wearing skins, living in caves, not eating cereals, and, of course, eating their food raw. States organized by or modeled on that Zhou Dynasty of North China spread to South China during the first millennium B.C., culminating in China's political unification under the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.c. Its cultural unification accelerated during that same period, as literate "civilized" Chi­ nese states absorbed, or were copied by, the illiterate "barbarians." Some of that cultural unification was ferocious: for instance, the first Qin emperor condemned all previously written historical books as worthless and ordered them burned, much to the detriment of our understanding of early Chinese history and writing. Those and other draconian measures must have contributed to the spread of North China's Sino-Tibetan lan­ guages over most of China, and to reducing the Miao-Yao and other lan­ guage families to their present fragmented distributions. Within East Asia, China's head start in food production, technology, writing, and state formation had the consequence that Chinese innova­ tions also contributed heavily to developments in neighboring regions. For instance, until the fourth millennium B.c. most of tropical Southeast Asia was still occupied by hunter-gatherers making pebble and flake stone tools belonging to what is termed the Hoabinhian tradition, named after the site of Hoa Binh, in Vietnam. Thereafter, Chinese-derived crops, Neolithic technology, village living, and pottery similar to that of South China spread into tropical Southeast Asia, probably accompanied by South Chi­ na's language families. The historical southward expansions of Burmese, Laotians, and Thais from South China completed the Salification of tropi­ cal Southeast Asia. All those modern peoples are recent offshoots of their South Chinese cousins. So overwhelming was this Chinese steamroller that the former peoples of tropical Southeast Asia have left behind few traces in the region's mod­ ern populations. Just three relict groups of hunter-gatherers—the Semang Negritos of the Malay Peninsula, the Andaman Islanders, and the Veddoid Negritos of Sri Lanka—remain to suggest that tropical Southeast Asia's former inhabitants may have been dark-skinned and curly-haired, like modern New Guineans and unlike the light-skinned, straight-haired South HOW CHINA BECAME CHINESE • 333 Chinese and the modern tropical Southeast Asians who are their offshoots.

Those relict Negritos of Southeast Asia may be the last survivors of the source population from which New Guinea was colonized. The Semang Negritos persisted as hunter-gatherers trading with neighboring farmers but adopted an Austroasiatic language from those farmers—much as, we shall see, Philippine Negrito and African Pygmy hunter-gatherers adopted languages from their farmer trading partners. Only on the remote Anda­ man Islands do languages unrelated to the South Chinese language families persist—the last linguistic survivors of what must have been hundreds of now extinct aboriginal Southeast Asian languages. Even Korea and Japan were heavily influenced by China, although their geographic isolation from it ensured that they did not lose their languages or physical and genetic distinctness, as did tropical Southeast Asia. Korea and Japan adopted rice from China in the second millennium B.c., bronze metallurgy by the first millennium B.c., and writing in the first millennium A.D. China also transmitted West Asian wheat and barley to Korea and Japan. In thus describing China's seminal role in East Asian civilization, we should not exaggerate. It is not the case that all cultural advances in East Asia stemmed from China and that Koreans, Japanese, and tropical South­ east Asians were noninventive barbarians who contributed nothing. The ancient Japanese developed some of the oldest pottery in the world and settled as hunter-gatherers in villages subsisting on Japan's rich seafood resources, long before the arrival of food production. Some crops were probably domesticated first or independently in Japan, Korea, and tropical Southeast Asia. But China's role was nonetheless disproportionate. For example, the prestige value of Chinese culture is still so great in Japan and Korea that Japan has no thought of discarding its Chinese-derived writing system despite its drawbacks for representing Japanese speech, while Korea is only now replacing its clumsy Chinese-derived writing with its wonderful indigenous han'gul alphabet. That persistence of Chinese writing in Japan and Korea is a vivid 20th-century legacy of plant and animal domestica­ tion in China nearly 10,000 years ago. Thanks to the achievements of East Asia's first farmers, China became Chinese, and peoples from Thailand to (as we shall see in the next chapter) Easter Island became their cousins. CHAPTER 17 SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA P ACIFIC ISLAND HISTORY IS ENCAPSULATED FOR ME IN AN incident that happened when three Indonesian friends and I walked into a store in Jayapura, the capital of Indonesian New Guinea. My friends' names were Achmad, Wiwor, and Sauakari, and the store was run by a merchant named Ping Wah. Achmad, an Indonesian government officer, was acting as the boss, because he and I were organizing an ecolog­ ical survey for the government and had hired Wiwor and Sauakari as local assistants. But Achmad had never before been in a New Guinea mountain forest and had no idea what supplies to buy. The results were comical. At the moment that my friends entered the store, Ping Wah was reading a Chinese newspaper. When he saw Wiwor and Sauakari, he kept reading it but then shoved it out of sight under the counter as soon as he noticed Achmad. Achmad picked up an ax head, causing Wiwor and Sauakari to laugh, because he was holding it upside down. Wiwor and Sauakari showed him how to hold it correctly and to test it. Achmad and Sauakari then looked at Wiwor's bare feet, with toes splayed wide from a lifetime of not wearing shoes. Sauakari picked out the widest available shoes and held them against Wiwor's feet, but the shoes were still too narrow, send­ ing Achmad and Sauakari and Ping Wah into peals of laughter. Achmad picked up a plastic comb with which to comb out his straight, coarse black SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 335 hair. Glancing at Wiwor's tough, tightly coiled hair, he handed the comb to Wiwor. It immediately stuck in Wiwor's hair, then broke as soon as Wiwor pulled on the comb. Everyone laughed, including Wiwor. Wiwor responded by reminding Achmad that he should buy lots of rice, because there would be no food to buy in New Guinea mountain villages except sweet potatoes, which would upset Achmad's stomach—more hilarity. Despite all the laughter, I could sense the underlying tensions. Achmad was Javan, Ping Wah Chinese, Wiwor a New Guinea highlander, and Sauakari a New Guinea lowlander from the north coast. Javans dominate the Indonesian government, which annexed western New Guinea in the 1960s and used bombs and machine guns to crush New Guinean opposi­ tion. Achmad later decided to stay in town and to let me do the forest survey alone with Wiwor and Sauakari. He explained his decision to me by pointing to his straight, coarse hair, so unlike that of New Guineans, and saying that New Guineans would kill anyone with hair like his if they found him far from army backup. Ping Wah had put away his newspaper because importation of Chinese writing is nominally illegal in Indonesian New Guinea. In much of Indone­ sia the merchants are Chinese immigrants. Latent mutual fear between the economically dominant Chinese and politically dominant Javans erupted in 1966 in a bloody revolution, when Javans slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Chinese. As New Guineans, Wiwor and Sauakari shared most New Guineans' resentment of Javan dictatorship, but they also scorned each other's groups. Highlanders dismiss lowlanders as effete sago eaters, while lowlanders dismiss highlanders as primitive big-heads, refer­ ring both to their massive coiled hair and to their reputation for arrogance.

Within a few days of my setting up an isolated forest camp with Wiwor and Sauakari, they came close to fighting each other with axes. Tensions among the groups that Achmad, Wiwor, Sauakari, and Ping Wah represent dominate the politics of Indonesia, the world's fourth-most- populous nation. These modern tensions have roots going back thousands of years. When we think of major overseas population movements, we tend to focus on those since Columbus's discovery of the Americas, and on the resulting replacements of non-Europeans by Europeans within historic times. But there were also big overseas movements long before Columbus, and prehistoric replacements of non-European peoples by other non-Euro­ pean peoples. Wiwor, Achmad, and Sauakari represent three prehistorical waves of people that moved overseas from the Asian mainland into the 336 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL Pacific. Wiwor's highlanders are probably descended from an early wave that had colonized New Guinea from Asia by 40,000 years ago. Achmad's ancestors arrived in Java ultimately from the South China coast, around 4,000 years ago, completing the replacement there of people related to Wiwor's ancestors. Sauakari's ancestors reached New Guinea around 3,600 years ago, as part of that same wave from the South China coast, while Ping Wah's ancestors still occupy China. The population movement that brought Achmad's and Sauakari's ancestors to Java and New Guinea, respectively, termed the Austronesian expansion, was among the biggest population movements of the last 6,000 years. One prong of it became the Polynesians, who populated the most remote islands of the Pacific and were the greatest seafarers among Neo­ lithic peoples. Austronesian languages are spoken today as native lan­ guages over more than half of the globe's span, from Madagascar to Easter Island. In this book on human population movements since the end of the Ice Ages, the Austronesian expansion occupies a central place, as one of the most important phenomena to be explained. Why did Austronesian people, stemming ultimately from mainland China, colonize Java and the rest of Indonesia and replace the original inhabitants there, instead of Indonesians colonizing China and replacing the Chinese? Having occupied all of Indonesia, why were the Austronesians then unable to occupy more than a narrow coastal strip of the New Guinea lowlands, and why were they completely unable to displace Wiwor's people from the New Guinea highlands? How did the descendants of Chinese emigrants become trans­ formed into Polynesians?

TODAY, THE POPULATION of Java, most other Indonesian islands (except the easternmost ones), and the Philippines is rather homogeneous.

In appearance and genes those islands' inhabitants are similar to South Chinese, and even more similar to tropical Southeast Asians, especially those of the Malay Peninsula. Their languages are equally homogeneous:

while 374 languages are spoken in the Philippines and western and central Indonesia, all of them are closely related and fall within the same sub- subfamily (Western Malayo-Polynesian) of the Austronesian language family. Austronesian languages reached the Asian mainland on the Malay Peninsula and in small pockets in Vietnam and Cambodia, near the west­ ernmost Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Borneo, but they occur nowhere else on the mainland (Figure 17.1). Some Austronesian words SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 337 Figure 17.1. The Austronesian language family consists of four subfamilies, three of them confined to Taiwan and one (Malayo-Poly¬ nesian) widespread. The latter subfamily in turn consists of two sub- subfamilies, Western Malayo-Polynesian (= W M-P) and Central- Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (= C-E M-P). The latter sub-subfamily in turn consists of four sub-sub-subfamilies, the very widespread Oce­ anic one to the east and three others to the west in a much smaller area comprising Halmahera, nearby islands of eastern Indonesia, and the west end of New Guinea.

borrowed into English include "taboo" and "tattoo" (from a Polynesian language), "boondocks" (from the Tagalog language of the Philippines), and "amok," "batik," and "orangutan" (from Malay). That genetic and linguistic uniformity of Indonesia and the Philippines is initially as surprising as is the predominant linguistic uniformity of China. The famous Java Homo erectus fossils prove that humans have occupied at least western Indonesia for a million years. That should have given ample time for humans to evolve genetic and linguistic diversity and tropical adaptations, such as dark skins like those of many other tropical peoples—but instead Indonesians and Filipinos have light skins. It is also surprising that Indonesians and Filipinos are so similar to trop- 338 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL ical Southeast Asians and South Chinese in other physical features besides light skins and in their genes. A glance at a map makes it obvious that Indonesia offered the only possible route by which humans could have reached New Guinea and Australia 40,000 years ago, so one might naively have expected modern Indonesians to be like modern New Guineans and Australians. In reality, there are only a few New Guinean-like populations in the Philippine / western Indonesia area, notably the Negritos living in mountainous areas of the Philippines. As is also true of the three New Guinean-like relict populations that I mentioned in speaking of tropical Southeast Asia (Chapter 16), the Philippine Negritos could be relicts of populations ancestral to Wiwor's people before they reached New Guinea.

Even those Negritos speak Austronesian languages similar to those of their Filipino neighbors, implying that they too (like Malaysia's Semang Negritos and Africa's Pygmies) have lost their original language. All these facts suggest strongly that either tropical Southeast Asians or South Chinese speaking Austronesian languages recently spread through the Philippines and Indonesia, replacing all the former inhabitants of those islands except the Philippine Negritos, and replacing all the original island languages. That event evidently took place too recently for the colonists to evolve dark skins, distinct language families, or genetic distinctiveness or diversity. Their languages are of course much more numerous than the eight dominant Chinese languages of mainland China, but are no more diverse. The proliferation of many similar languages in the Philippines and Indonesia merely reflects the fact that the islands never underwent a politi­ cal and cultural unification, as did China. Details of language distributions provide valuable clues to the route of this hypothesized Austronesian expansion. The whole Austronesian lan­ guage family consists of 959 languages, divided among four subfamilies.

But one of those subfamilies, termed Malayo-Polynesian, comprises 945 of those 959 languages and covers almost the entire geographic range of the Austronesian family. Before the recent overseas expansion of Europe­ ans speaking Indo-European languages, Austronesian was the most wide­ spread language family in the world. That suggests that the Malayo- Polynesian subfamily differentiated recently out of the Austronesian fam­ ily and spread far from the Austronesian homeland, giving rise to many local languages, all of which are still closely related because there has been too little time to develop large linguistic differences. For the location of that Austronesian homeland, we should therefore look not to Malayo- SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 3 3 9 Polynesian but to the other three Austronesian subfamilies, which differ considerably more from each other and from Malayo-Polynesian than the sub-subfamilies of Malayo-Polynesian differ among each other. It turns out that those three other subfamilies have coincident distribu­ tions, all of them tiny compared with the distribution of Malayo-Polyne­ sian. They are confined to aborigines of the island of Taiwan, lying only 90 miles from the South China mainland. Taiwan's aborigines had the island largely to themselves until mainland Chinese began settling in large numbers within the last thousand years. Still more mainlanders arrived after 1945, especially after the Chinese Communists defeated the Chinese Nationalists in 1949, so that aborigines now constitute only 2 percent of Taiwan's population. The concentration of three out of the four Austrone­ sian subfamilies on Taiwan suggests that, within the present Austronesian realm, Taiwan is the homeland where Austronesian languages have been spoken for the most millennia and have consequently had the longest time in which to diverge. All other Austronesian languages, from those on Mad­ agascar to those on Easter Island, would then stem from a population expansion out of Taiwan.

WE CAN NOW turn to archaeological evidence. While the debris of ancient village sites does not include fossilized words along with bones and pottery, it does reveal movements of people and cultural artifacts that could be associated with languages. Like the rest of the world, most of the present Austronesian realm—Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and many Pacific islands—was originally occupied by hunter-gatherers lacking pottery, polished stone tools, domestic animals, and crops. (The sole exceptions to this generalization are the remote islands of Madagascar, eastern Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, which were never reached by hunter-gatherers and remained empty of humans until the Austronesian expansion.) The first archaeological signs of something different within the Austronesian realm come from—Taiwan. Beginning around the fourth millennium B.C., polished stone tools and a distinctive decorated pottery style (so-called Ta-p'en-k'eng pottery) derived from earlier South China mainland pottery appeared on Taiwan and on the opposite coast of the South China mainland. Remains of rice and millet at later Taiwanese sites provide evidence of agriculture. Ta-p'en-k'eng sites of Taiwan and the South China coast are full of fish 340 ' GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL bones and mollusk shells, as well as of stone net sinkers and adzes suitable for hollowing out a wooden canoe. Evidently, those first Neolithic occu­ pants of Taiwan had watercraft adequate for deep-sea fishing and for regu­ lar sea traffic across Taiwan Strait, separating that island from the China coast. Thus, Taiwan Strait may have served as the training ground where mainland Chinese developed the open-water maritime skills that would permit them to expand over the Pacific. One specific type of artifact linking Taiwan's Ta-p'en-k'eng culture to later Pacific island cultures is a bark beater, a stone implement used for pounding the fibrous bark of certain tree species into rope, nets, and cloth­ ing. Once Pacific peoples spread beyond the range of wool-yielding domes­ tic animals and fiber plant crops and hence of woven clothing, they became dependent on pounded bark "cloth" for their clothing. Inhabitants of Rennell Island, a traditional Polynesian island that did not become West­ ernized until the 1930s, told me that Westernization yielded the wonderful side benefit that the island became quiet. No more sounds of bark beaters everywhere, pounding out bark cloth from dawn until after dusk every day! Within a millennium or so after the Ta-p'en-k'eng culture reached Tai­ wan, archaeological evidence shows that cultures obviously derived from it spread farther and farther from Taiwan to fill up the modern Austrone­ sian realm (Figure 17.2). The evidence includes ground stone tools, pot­ tery, bones of domestic pigs, and crop remains. For example, the decorated Ta-p'en-k'eng pottery on Taiwan gave way to undecorated plain or red pottery, which has also been found at sites in the Philippines and on the Indonesian islands of Celebes and Timor. This cultural "package" of pot­ tery, stone tools, and domesticates appeared around 3000 B.c. in the Phil­ ippines, around 2500 B.c. on the Indonesian islands of Celebes and North Borneo and Timor, around 2000 B.C. on Java and Sumatra, and around 1600 B.C. in the New Guinea region. There, as we shall see, the expansion assumed a speedboat pace, as bearers of the cultural package raced east­ ward into the previously uninhabited Pacific Ocean beyond the Solomon Archipelago. The last phases of the expansion, during the millennium after A.D. 1, resulted in the colonization of every Polynesian and Micronesian island capable of supporting humans. Astonishingly, it also swept west­ ward across the Indian Ocean to the east coast of Africa, resulting in the colonization of the island of Madagascar. SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 341 Figure 17.2. The paths of the Austronesian expansion, with approxi­ mate dates when each region was reached. 4a = Borneo, 4b = Celebes, 4c = Timor (around 2500 B.C.).

5a = Halmahera (around 1600 B.C.).

5b = Java, 5c = Sumatra (around 2000 B.C.).

6a = Bismarck Archipel­ ago (around 1600 B.C.).

6b = Malay Peninsula, 6c - Vietnam (around 1000 B.C.).

7 = Solomon Archipelago (around 1600 B.C.).

8 = Santa Cruz, 9c = Tonga, 9d = New Caledonia (around 1200 B.C.).

10b = Society Islands, 10c = Cook Islands, 11a = Tuamotu Archipelago (around A.D. 1). At least until the expansion reached coastal New Guinea, travel between islands was probably by double-outrigger sailing canoes, which are still widespread throughout Indonesia today. That boat design repre­ sented a major advance over the simple dugout canoes prevalent among traditional peoples living on inland waterways throughout the world. A dugout canoe is just what its name implies: a solid tree trunk "dug out" (that is, hollowed out), and its ends shaped, by an adze. Since the canoe is as round-bottomed as the trunk from which it was carved, the least imbal­ ance in weight distribution tips the canoe toward the overweighted side. 342 " GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL Whenever I've been paddled in dugouts up New Guinea rivers by New Guineans, I have spent much of the trip in terror: it seemed that every slight movement of mine risked capsizing the canoe and spilling out me and my binoculars to commune with crocodiles. New Guineans manage to look secure while paddling dugouts on calm lakes and rivers, but not even New Guineans can use a dugout in seas with modest waves. Hence some stabilizing device must have been essential not only for the Austrone­ sian expansion through Indonesia but even for the initial colonization of Taiwan. The solution was to lash two smaller logs ("outriggers") parallel to the hull and several feet from it, one on each side, connected to the hull by poles lashed perpendicular to the hull and outriggers. Whenever the hull starts to tip toward one side, the buoyancy of the outrigger on that side prevents the outrigger from being pushed under the water and hence makes it virtually impossible to capsize the vessel. The invention of the double-outrigger sailing canoe may have been the technological break­ through that triggered the Austronesian expansion from the Chinese main­ land.

TWO STRIKING COINCIDENCES between archaeological and linguistic evidence support the inference that the people bringing a Neolithic culture to Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia thousands of years ago spoke Austronesian languages and were ancestral to the Austronesian speakers still inhabiting those islands today. First, both types of evidence point unequivocally to the colonization of Taiwan as the first stage of the expan­ sion from the South China coast, and to the colonization of the Philippines and Indonesia from Taiwan as the next stage. If the expansion had pro­ ceeded from tropical Southeast Asia's Malay Peninsula to the nearest Indo­ nesian island of Sumatra, then to other Indonesian islands, and finally to the Philippines and Taiwan, we would find the deepest divisions (reflecting the greatest time depth) of the Austronesian language family among the modern languages of the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, and the languages of Taiwan and the Philippines would have differentiated only recently within a single subfamily. Instead, the deepest divisions are in Taiwan, and the languages of the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra fall together in the same sub-sub-subfamily: a recent branch of the Western Malayo-Polyne- SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 343 sian sub-subfamily, which is in turn a fairly recent branch of the Malayo- Polynesian subfamily. Those details of linguistic relationships agree per­ fectly with the archaeological evidence that the colonization of the Malay Peninsula was recent, and followed rather than preceded the colonization of Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The other coincidence between archaeological and linguistic evidence concerns the cultural baggage that ancient Austronesians used. Archaeol­ ogy provides us with direct evidence of culture in the form of pottery, pig and fish bones, and so on. One might initially wonder how a linguist, studying only modern languages whose unwritten ancestral forms remain unknown, could ever figure out whether Austronesians living on Taiwan 6,000 years ago had pigs. The solution is to reconstruct the vocabularies of vanished ancient languages (so-called protolanguages) by comparing vocabularies of modern languages derived from them. For instance, the words meaning "sheep" in many languages of the Indo-European language family, distributed from Ireland to India, are quite similar: "avis," "avis," "ovis," "oveja," "ovtsa," "owis," and "oi" in Lithuanian, Sanskrit, Latin, Spanish, Russian, Greek, and Irish, respec­ tively. (The English "sheep" is obviously from a different root, but English retains the original root in the word "ewe.") Comparison of the sound shifts that the various modern Indo-European languages have undergone during their histories suggests that the original form was "owis" in the ancestral Indo-European language spoken around 6,000 years ago. That unwritten ancestral language is termed Proto-Indo-European. Evidently, Proto-Indo-Europeans 6,000 years ago had sheep, in agreement with archaeological evidence. Nearly 2,000 other words of their vocabulary can similarly be reconstructed, including words for "goat," "horse," "wheel," "brother," and "eye." But no Proto-Indo-Euro­ pean word can be reconstructed for "gun," which uses different roots in different modern Indo-European languages: "gun" in English, "fusil" in French, "ruzhyo" in Russian, and so on. That shouldn't surprise us: people 6,000 years ago couldn't possibly have had a word for guns, which were invented only within the past 1,000 years. Since there was thus no inher­ ited shared root meaning "gun," each Indo-European language had to invent or borrow its own word when guns were finally invented. Proceeding in the same way, we can compare modern Taiwanese, Philip­ pine, Indonesian, and Polynesian languages to reconstruct a Proto-Aus- 344 " GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL tronesian language spoken in the distant past. To no one's surprise, that reconstructed Proto-Austronesian language had words with meanings such as "two," "bird," "ear," and "head louse": of course, Proto-Aus- tronesians could count to 2, knew of birds, and had ears and lice. More interestingly, the reconstructed language had words for "pig," "dog," and "rice," which must therefore have been part of Proto-Austronesian cul­ ture. The reconstructed language is full of words indicating a maritime economy, such as "outrigger canoe," "sail," "giant clam," "octopus," "fish trap," and "sea turtle." This linguistic evidence regarding the culture of Proto-Austronesians, wherever and whenever they lived, agrees well with the archaeological evidence regarding the pottery-making, sea-ori­ ented, food-producing people living on Taiwan around 6,000 years ago. The same procedure can be applied to reconstruct Proto-Malayo-Poly- nesian, the ancestral language spoken by Austronesians after emigrating from Taiwan. Proto-Malayo-Polynesian contains words for many tropical crops like taro, breadfruit, bananas, yams, and coconuts, for which no word can be reconstructed in Proto-Austronesian. Thus, the linguistic evi­ dence suggests that many tropical crops were added to the Austronesian repertoire after the emigration from Taiwan. This conclusion agrees with archaeological evidence: as colonizing farmers spread southward from Tai­ wan (lying about 23 degrees north of the equator) toward the equatorial tropics, they came to depend increasingly on tropical root and tree crops, which they proceeded to carry with them out into the tropical Pacific. How could those Austronesian-speaking farmers from South China via Taiwan replace the original hunter-gatherer population of the Philippines and western Indonesia so completely that little genetic and no linguistic evidence of that original population survived? The reasons resemble the reasons why Europeans replaced or exterminated Native Australians within the last two centuries, and why South Chinese replaced the original tropical Southeast Asians earlier: the farmers' much denser populations, superior tools and weapons, more developed watercraft and maritime skills, and epidemic diseases to which the farmers but not the hunter-gath­ erers had some resistance. On the Asian mainland Austronesian-speaking farmers were able similarly to replace some of the former hunter-gatherers of the Malay Peninsula, because Austronesians colonized the peninsula from the south and east (from the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Borneo) around the same time that Austroasiatic-speaking farmers were colonizing the peninsula from the north (from Thailand). Other Austrone- SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 345 sians managed to establish themselves in parts of southern Vietnam and Cambodia to become the ancestors of the modern Chamic minority of those countries. However, Austronesian farmers could spread no farther into the South­ east Asian mainland, because Austroasiatic and Tai-Kadai farmers had already replaced the former hunter-gatherers there, and because Austrone­ sian farmers had no advantage over Austroasiatic and Tai-Kadai farmers.

Although we infer that Austronesian speakers originated from coastal South China, Austronesian languages today are not spoken anywhere in mainland China, possibly because they were among the hundreds of for­ mer Chinese languages eliminated by the southward expansion of Sino- Tibetan speakers. But the language families closest to Austronesian are thought to be Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic, and Miao-Yao. Thus, while Aus­ tronesian languages in China may not have survived the onslaught of Chi­ nese dynasties, some of their sister and cousin languages did.

WE HAVE NOW followed the initial stages of the Austronesian expan­ sion for 2,500 miles from the South China coast, through Taiwan and the Philippines, to western and central Indonesia. In the course of that expansion, Austronesians came to occupy all habitable areas of those islands, from the seacoast to the interior, and from the lowlands to the mountains. By 1500 B.c. their familiar archaeological hallmarks, including pig bones and plain red-slipped pottery, show that they had reached the eastern Indonesian island of Halmahera, less than 200 miles from the west­ ern end of the big mountainous island of New Guinea. Did they proceed to overrun that island, just as they had already overrun the big mountain­ ous islands of Celebes, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra? They did not, as a glance at the faces of most modern New Guineans makes obvious, and as detailed studies of New Guinean genes confirm.

My friend Wiwor and all other New Guinea highlanders differ obviously from Indonesians, Filipinos, and South Chinese in their dark skins, tightly coiled hair, and face shapes. Most lowlanders from New Guinea's interior and south coast resemble the highlanders except that they tend to be taller.

Geneticists have failed to find characteristic Austronesian gene markers in blood samples from New Guinea highlanders. But peoples of New Guinea's north and east coasts, and of the Bismarck and Solomon Archipelagoes north and east of New Guinea, present a more 346 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL complex picture. In appearance, they are variably intermediate between highlanders like Wiwor and Indonesians like Achmad, though on the aver­ age considerably closer to Wiwor. For instance, my friend Sauakari from the north coast has wavy hair intermediate between Achmad's straight hair and Wiwor's coiled hair, and skin somewhat paler than Wiwor's, though considerably darker than Achmad's. Genetically, the Bismarck and Solo­ mon islanders and north coastal New Guineans are about 15 percent Austronesian and 85 percent like New Guinea highlanders. Hence Aus­ tronesians evidently reached the New Guinea region but failed completely to penetrate the island's interior and were genetically diluted by New Guinea's previous residents on the north coast and islands. Modern languages tell essentially the same story but add detail. In Chapter 15 I explained that most New Guinea languages, termed Papuan languages, are unrelated to any language families elsewhere in the world.

Without exception, every language spoken in the New Guinea mountains, the whole of southwestern and south-central lowland New Guinea, includ­ ing the coast, and the interior of northern New Guinea is a Papuan lan­ guage. But Austronesian languages are spoken in a narrow strip immediately on the north and southeast coasts. Most languages of the Bis­ marck and Solomon islands are Austronesian: Papuan languages are spo­ ken only in isolated pockets on a few islands. Austronesian languages spoken in the Bismarcks and Solomons and north coastal New Guinea are related, as a separate sub-sub-subfamily termed Oceanic, to the sub-sub-subfamily of languages spoken on Hal¬ mahera and the west end of New Guinea. That linguistic relationship con­ firms, as one would expect from a map, that Austronesian speakers of the New Guinea region arrived by way of Halmahera. Details of Austronesian and Papuan languages and their distributions in North New Guinea testify to long contact between the Austronesian invaders and the Papuan-speak­ ing residents. Both the Austronesian and the Papuan languages of the region show massive influences of each other's vocabularies and gram­ mars, making it difficult to decide whether certain languages are basically Austronesian languages influenced by Papuan ones or the reverse. As one travels from village to village along the north coast or its fringing islands, one passes from a village with an Austronesian language to a village with a Papuan language and then to another Austronesian-speaking village, without any genetic discontinuity at the linguistic boundaries. SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 347 All this suggests that descendants of Austronesian invaders and of origi­ nal New Guineans have been trading, intermarrying, and acquiring each other's genes and languages for several thousand years on the North New Guinea coast and its islands. That long contact transferred Austronesian languages more effectively than Austronesian genes, with the result that most Bismarck and Solomon islanders now speak Austronesian languages, even though their appearance and most of their genes are still Papuan. But neither the genes nor the languages of the Austronesians penetrated New Guinea's interior. The outcome of their invasion of New Guinea was thus very different from the outcome of their invasion of Borneo, Celebes, and other big Indonesian islands, where their steamroller eliminated almost all traces of the previous inhabitants' genes and languages. To understand what happened in New Guinea, let us now turn to the evidence from archaeology.

AROUND 1600 B.C., almost simultaneously with their appearance on Halmahera, the familiar archaeological hallmarks of the Austronesian expansion—pigs, chickens, dogs, red-slipped pottery, and adzes of ground stone and of giant clamshells—appear in the New Guinea region. But two features distinguish the Austronesians' arrival there from their earlier arrival in the Philippines and Indonesia. The first feature consists of pottery designs, which are aesthetic features of no economic significance but which do let archaeologists immediately recognize an early Austronesian site. Whereas most early Austronesian pottery in the Philippines and Indonesia was undecorated, pottery in the New Guinea region was finely decorated with geometric designs arranged in horizontal bands. In other respects the pottery preserved the red slip and the vessel forms characteristic of earlier Austronesian pottery in Indonesia.

Evidently, Austronesian settlers in the New Guinea region got the idea of "tattooing" their pots, perhaps inspired by geometric designs that they had already been using on their bark cloth and body tattoos. This style is termed Lapita pottery, after an archaeological site named Lapita, where it was described. The much more significant distinguishing feature of early Austronesian sites in the New Guinea region is their distribution. In contrast to those in the Philippines and Indonesia, where even the earliest known Austronesian 348 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL sites are on big islands like Luzon and Borneo and Celebes, sites with Lap- ita pottery in the New Guinea region are virtually confined to small islets fringing remote larger islands. To date, Lapita pottery has been found at only one site (Aitape) on the north coast of New Guinea itself, and at a couple of sites in the Solomons. Most Lapita sites of the New Guinea region are in the Bismarcks, on islets off the coast of the larger Bismarck islands, occasionally on the coasts of the larger islands themselves. Since (as we shall see) the makers of Lapita pottery were capable of sailing thou­ sands of miles, their failure to transfer their villages a few miles to the large Bismarck islands, or a few dozen miles to New Guinea, was certainly not due to inability to get there. The basis of Lapita subsistence can be reconstructed from the garbage excavated by archaeologists at Lapita sites. Lapita people depended heav­ ily on seafood, including fish, porpoises, sea turtles, sharks, and shellfish.

They had pigs, chickens, and dogs and ate the nuts of many trees (includ­ ing coconuts). While they probably also ate the usual Austronesian root crops, such as taro and yams, evidence of those crops is hard to obtain, because hard nut shells are much more likely than soft roots to persist for thousands of years in garbage heaps. Naturally, it is impossible to prove directly that the people who made Lapita pots spoke an Austronesian language. However, two facts make this inference virtually certain. First, except for the decorations on the pots, the pots themselves and their associated cultural paraphernalia are similar to the cultural remains found at Indonesian and Philippine sites ancestral to modern Austronesian-speaking societies. Second, Lapita pot­ tery also appears on remote Pacific islands with no previous human inhab­ itants, with no evidence of a major second wave of settlement subsequent to that bringing Lapita pots, and where the modern inhabitants speak an Austronesian language (more of this below). Hence Lapita pottery may be safely assumed to mark Austronesians' arrival in the New Guinea region. What were those Austronesian pot makers doing on islets adjacent to bigger islands? They were probably living in the same way as modern pot makers lived until recently on islets in the New Guinea region. In 1972 I visited such a village on Malai Islet, in the Siassi island group, off the medium-sized island of Umboi, off the larger Bismarck island of New Brit­ ain. When I stepped ashore on Malai in search of birds, knowing nothing about the people there, I was astonished by the sight that greeted me. SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 349 Instead of the usual small village of low huts, surrounded by large gardens sufficient to feed the village, and with a few canoes drawn up on the beach, most of the area of Malai was occupied by two-story wooden houses side by side, leaving no ground available for gardens—the New Guinea equiva­ lent of downtown Manhattan. On the beach were rows of big canoes. It turned out that Malai islanders, besides being fishermen, were also special­ ized potters, carvers, and traders, who lived by making beautifully decor­ ated pots and wooden bowls, transporting them in their canoes to larger islands and exchanging their wares for pigs, dogs, vegetables, and other necessities. Even the timber for Malai canoes was obtained by trade from villagers on nearby Umboi Island, since Malai does not have trees big enough to be fashioned into canoes. In the days before European shipping, trade between islands in the New Guinea region was monopolized by such specialized groups of canoe- building potters, skilled in sailing without navigational instruments, and living on offshore islets or occasionally in mainland coastal villages. By the time I reached Malai in 1972, those indigenous trade networks had col­ lapsed or contracted, partly because of competition from European motor vessels and aluminum pots, partly because the Australian colonial govern­ ment forbade long-distance canoe voyaging after some accidents in which traders were drowned. I would guess that the Lapita potters were the inter- island traders of the New Guinea region in the centuries after 1600 B.C. The spread of Austronesian languages to the north coast of New Guinea itself, and over even the largest Bismarck and Solomon islands, must have occurred mostly after Lapita times, since Lapita sites themselves were con­ centrated on Bismarck islets. Not until around A.D. 1 did pottery derived from the Lapita style appear on the south side of New Guinea's southeast peninsula. When Europeans began exploring New Guinea in the late 19th century, all the remainder of New Guinea's south coast still supported pop­ ulations only of Papuan-language speakers, even though Austronesian- speaking populations were established not only on the southeastern penin­ sula but also on the Aru and Kei Islands (lying 70-80 miles off western New Guinea's south coast). Austronesians thus had thousands of years in which to colonize New Guinea's interior and its southern coast from nearby bases, but they never did so. Even their colonization of North New Guinea's coastal fringe was more linguistic than genetic: all northern coastal peoples remained predominantly New Guineans in their genes. At 350 ' GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL most, some of them merely adopted Austronesian languages, possibly in order to communicate with the long-distance traders who linked societies.

THUS, THE OUTCOME of the Austronesian expansion in the New Guinea region was opposite to that in Indonesia and the Philippines. In the latter region the indigenous population disappeared—presumably driven off, killed, infected, or assimilated by the invaders. In the former region the indigenous population mostly kept the invaders out. The invad­ ers (the Austronesians) were the same in both cases, and the indigenous populations may also have been genetically similar to each other, if the original Indonesian population supplanted by Austronesians really was related to New Guineans, as I suggested earlier. Why the opposite out­ comes? The answer becomes obvious when one considers the differing cultural circumstances of Indonesia's and New Guinea's indigenous populations.

Before Austronesians arrived, most of Indonesia was thinly occupied by hunter-gatherers lacking even polished stone tools. In contrast, food pro­ duction had already been established for thousands of years in the New Guinea highlands, and probably in the New Guinea lowlands and in the Bismarcks and Solomons as well. The New Guinea highlands supported some of the densest populations of Stone Age people anywhere in the mod­ ern world. Austronesians enjoyed few advantages in competing with those estab­ lished New Guinean populations. Some of the crops on which Austrone­ sians subsisted, such as taro, yams, and bananas, had probably already been independently domesticated in New Guinea before Austronesians arrived. The New Guineans readily integrated Austronesian chickens, dogs, and especially pigs into their food-producing economies. New Guin­ eans already had polished stone tools. They were at least as resistant to tropical diseases as were Austronesians, because they carried the same five types of genetic protections against malaria as did Austronesians, and some or all of those genes evolved independently in New Guinea. New Guineans were already accomplished seafarers, although not as accom­ plished as the makers of Lapita pottery. Tens of thousands of years before the arrival of Austronesians, New Guineans had colonized the Bismarck and Solomon Archipelagoes, and a trade in obsidian (a volcanic stone suit­ able for making sharp tools) was thriving in the Bismarcks at least 18,000 SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 351 years before the Austronesians arrived. New Guineans even seem to have expanded recently westward against the Austronesian tide, into eastern Indonesia, where languages spoken on the islands of North Halmahera and of Timor are typical Papuan languages related to some languages of western New Guinea. In short, the variable outcomes of the Austronesian expansion strikingly illustrate the role of food production in human population movements.

Austronesian food-producers migrated into two regions (New Guinea and Indonesia) occupied by resident peoples who were probably related to each other. The residents of Indonesia were still hunter-gatherers, while the residents of New Guinea were already food producers and had devel­ oped many of the concomitants of food production (dense populations, disease resistance, more advanced technology, and so on). As a result, while the Austronesian expansion swept away the original Indonesians, it failed to make much headway in the New Guinea region, just as it also failed to make headway against Austroasiatic and Tai-Kadai food produc­ ers in tropical Southeast Asia. We have now traced the Austronesian expansion through Indonesia and up to the shores of New Guinea and tropical Southeast Asia. In Chapter 19 we shall trace it across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar, while in Chap­ ter 15 we saw that ecological difficulties kept Austronesians from estab­ lishing themselves in northern and western Australia. The expansion's remaining thrust began when the Lapita potters sailed far eastward into the Pacific beyond the Solomons, into an island realm that no other humans had reached previously. Around 1200 B.c. Lapita potsherds, the familiar triumvirate of pigs and chickens and dogs, and the usual other archaeological hallmarks of Austronesians appeared on the Pacific archi­ pelagoes of Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga, over a thousand miles east of the Solo­ mons. Early in the Christian era, most of those same hallmarks (with the notable exception of pottery) appeared on the islands of eastern Polynesia, including the Societies and Marquesas. Further long overwater canoe voy­ ages brought settlers north to Hawaii, east to Pitcairn and Easter Islands, and southwest to New Zealand. The native inhabitants of most of those islands today are the Polynesians, who thus are the direct descendants of the Lapita potters. They speak Austronesian languages closely related to those of the New Guinea region, and their main crops are the Austronesian package that included taro, yams, bananas, coconuts, and breadfruit. With the occupation of the Chatham Islands off New Zealand around 352 " GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL A.D. 1400, barely a century before European "explorers" entered the Pacific, the task of exploring the Pacific was finally completed by Asians.

Their tradition of exploration, lasting tens of thousands of years, had begun when Wiwor's ancestors spread through Indonesia to New Guinea and Australia. It ended only when it had run out of targets and almost every habitable Pacific island had been occupied.

To ANYONE INTERESTED in world history, human societies of East Asia and the Pacific are instructive, because they provide so many exam­ ples of how environment molds history. Depending on their geographic homeland, East Asian and Pacific peoples differed in their access to domes­ ticable wild plant and animal species and in their connectedness to other peoples. Again and again, people with access to the prerequisites for food production, and with a location favoring diffusion of technology from elsewhere, replaced peoples lacking these advantages. Again and again, when a single wave of colonists spread out over diverse environments, their descendants developed in separate ways, depending on those environ­ mental differences. For instance, we have seen that South Chinese developed indigenous food production and technology, received writing and still more technol­ ogy and political structures from North China, and went on to colonize tropical Southeast Asia and Taiwan, largely replacing the former inhabit­ ants of those areas. Within Southeast Asia, among the descendants or rela­ tives of those food-producing South Chinese colonists, the Yumbri in the mountain rain forests of northeastern Thailand and Laos reverted to living as hunter-gatherers, while the Yumbri's close relatives the Vietnamese (speaking a language in the same sub-subfamily of Austroasiatic as the Yumbri language) remained food producers in the rich Red Delta and established a vast metal-based empire. Similarly, among Austronesian emi­ grant farmers from Taiwan and Indonesia, the Punan in the rain forests of Borneo were forced to turn back to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, while their relatives living on Java's rich volcanic soils remained food producers, founded a kingdom under the influence of India, adopted writing, and built the great Buddhist monument at Borobudur. The Austronesians who went on to colonize Polynesia became isolated from East Asian metallurgy and writing and hence remained without writing or metal. As we saw in Chapter 2, though, Polynesian political and social organization and econo- SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 353 mies underwent great diversification in different environments. Within a millennium, East Polynesian colonists had reverted to hunting-gathering on the Chathams while building a protostate with intensive food produc­ tion on Hawaii. When Europeans at last arrived, their technological and other advan­ tages enabled them to establish temporary colonial domination over most of tropical Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands. However, indigenous germs and food producers prevented Europeans from settling most of this region in significant numbers. Within this area, only New Zealand, New Caledonia, and Hawaii—the largest and most remote islands, lying far­ thest from the equator and hence in the most nearly temperate (Europe­ like) climates—now support large European populations. Thus, unlike Australia and the Americas, East Asia and most Pacific islands remain occupied by East Asian and Pacific peoples.