Guns, Germs, and Steel: Part IV: Chapters 15-17

Most laypeople would describe as the most salient feature of Native Australian societies their seeming “backwardness.”

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 separating 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.

Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans have also diverged genetically, physically, and linguistically from each other.

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.

The development of New Guinea highland agriculture must have triggered a big population explosion thousands of years ago, because the highlands could have supported only very low population densities of hunter-gatherers after New Guinea’s original mega-fauna of giant marsupials had been exterminated.

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.

Those difficulties of terrain, combined with the state of intermittent warfare that characterized relations between New Guinea bands or villages, account for traditional New Guinea’s linguistic, cultural, and political fragmentation.

While the New Guinea hemi-continent of Greater Australia thus developed both animal husbandry and agriculture, the Australian hemi-continent developed neither.

Unpredictable severe droughts last for years, punctuated by equally unpredictable torrential rains and floods.

The previously unexploited highlands of southeastern Australia began to be visited 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.

Aboriginal Australia instead consisted of a sea of very sparsely populated desert separating several more productive ecological “islands,” each of them holding only a fraction of the continent’s population and with interactions attenuated by the intervening distance.

The boomerang, that quintessential Australian weapon, was abandoned in the Cape York Peninsula of northeastern Australia.

For example, the Tasmanian archaeological record documents the disappearance of fishing, and of awls, needles, and other bone tools, around 1500 B.C.

The documented instances of technological regression on the Australian mainland, and the example of Tasmania, suggest that the limited repertoire of Native Australians 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.

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 short, the persistence of Stone Age nomadic hunter-gatherers in Australia, trading with Stone Age New Guinea farmers and Iron Age Indonesian farmers, at first seems to suggest singular obstinacy on the part of Native Australians.

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 non-literate nomadic hunter-gatherers?

Immigration, 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.

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.

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.

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.

But because the previous millennium in China is poorly known archaeologically, one cannot decide at present whether the origins of Chinese food production were contemporaneous with those in the Fertile Crescent, slightly earlier, or slightly later.

In the fourth millennium B.C. those local cultures expanded geographically and began to interact, compete with each other, and coalesce.

While China’s north-south gradient retarded crop diffusion, the gradient 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 transected neither by desert, as is Africa and northern Mexico, nor by a narrow isthmus, as is Central America.

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 system.

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.

In thus describing China’s seminal role in East Asian civilization, we should not exaggerate.

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.

Highlanders dismiss lowlanders as effete sago eaters, while lowlanders dismiss highlanders as primitive big-heads, referring both to their massive coiled hair and to their reputation for arrogance.

The proliferation of many similar languages in the Philippines and Indonesia merely reflects the fact that the islands never underwent a political and cultural unification, as did China.

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.

Thus, the outcome of the Austronesian expansion in the New Guinea region was opposite to that in Indonesia and the Philippines. In the latter region the indigenous population disappeared—presumably driven off, killed, infected, or assimilated by the invaders.

The residents of Indonesia were still hunter-gatherers, while the residents of New Guinea were already food producers and had developed many of the concomitants of food production (dense populations, disease resistance, more advanced technology, and so on).

Lapita potsherds, the familiar triumvirate of pigs and chickens and dogs, and the usual other archaeological hallmarks of Austronesians appeared on the Pacific archipelagoes of Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga, over a thousand miles east of the Solomons.