GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES .docx

GUNS,
GERMS AND
STEEL
THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES
Jared Diamond
W. W. Norton & Company
New York London
C H A P T E R 1 5
Y A L I ' S P E O P L E
WH E N M Y W I F E , M A R I E , A N D I W E R E V A C A
T I O N I N G I N 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 G U N S , G E R M S , 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-
Y A L I ' S P E O P L E • 2 9 7
world tour, applying the lessons of Parts 2 and 3 to

understanding the
differing histories of all the continents.
MOST LAY P E O P L E W O U L D 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

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.
3 0 0 • G U N S , G E R M S , A N D S T E E L
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.
T H E F I R S T 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
Y A L I ' S P E O P L E • 3 0 1
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. N o t 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.

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
Y A L I ' S P E O P L E • 3 0 3
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 E A R L I E S T A N D 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
3 0 4 " G U N S , G E R M S , A N D S T E E L
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.
N E W G U I N E A T H U S 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-
Y A L I ' S P E O P L E " 3 0 7
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

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.
W H I L E T H E N E W 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
Y A L I ' S P E O P L E • 3 0 9
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.
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
Y A L I ' S P E O P L E • 3 1 1
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.
W H Y D I D A U S T R A L I A 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
3 1 2 . • G U N S , G E R M S , 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,

Y A L I ' S P E O P L E • 3 1 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).
W H Y D I D N ' T M O R E - A D V A N C E D 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
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-
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
Y A L I ' S P E O P L E " 3 1 7
ubiquitous role of geography in the transmission of human
culture and
technology.
I T R E M A I N S F O R 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
Y A L I ' S P E O P L E • 3 1 9
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.
E U R O P E A N S C O L O N I Z E D A U S T R A L I A ,
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.
W E CAN N O W return t o 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
Y A L I ' S P E O P L E • 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.
C H A P T E R 1 6
H o w C H I N A BECAME

C H I N E S E
IM M I G R A T I O N , 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 C H I N A BECAME C H I N E S E • 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
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 C O N V E N I E N T S T A R T I N G 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.

H O W C H I N A B E C A M E C H I N E S E • 3 2 5
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.
H O W C H I N A B E C A M E C H I N E S E • 3 2 7
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.
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 C H I N E S E • 3 2 9
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 E V E R Y W H E R E E L S E 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,
3 3 0 ' G U N S , G E R M S , A N D S T E E L
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
H O W C H I N A B E C A M E C H I N E S E - 3 3 1
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 r e g i o n s - t h e Middle states and the
Rong, Yi, and other
wild tribes around t h e m - h a d all their several natures, which
they could
not be made to alter. The tribes on the east were called Yi. They
had their
3 3 2 . • G U N S , G E R M S , A N D S T E E L

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 C H I N E S E • 3 3 3
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.
C H A P T E R 1 7
S P E E D B O A T T O P O L Y N E S I A
PA C I F I C I S L A N D H I S T O R Y I S E N C A P S U L A
T E D F O R M E I N A N 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
S P E E D B O A T T O P O L Y N E S I A • 3 3 5
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
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, T H E P O P U L A T I O N 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 T O POLYNESIA • 3 3 7
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-
3 3 8 • G U N S , G E R M S , 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-
S P E E D B O A T TO P O L Y N E S I A • 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 N O W 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
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.
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.
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 S T R I K I N G C O I N C I D E N C E S 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-
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-
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-
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 N O W 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
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.
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.
A R O U N D 1 6 0 0 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
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.
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
most, some of them merely adopted Austronesian languages,
possibly in
order to communicate with the long-distance traders who linked
societies.
T H U S , T H E O U T C O M E 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
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
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 A N Y O N E I N T E R E S T E D 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-
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.

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