GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

YALI'S PEOPLE • 297
world tour, applying the lessons of Parts 2 and 3 to understanding the
differing histories of all the continents.
MOST LAY PEOPLE WOULD describe as the most salient feature of
Native Australian societies their seeming "backwardness." Australia is the
sole continent where, in modern times, all native peoples still lived without
any of the hallmarks of so-called civilization—without farming, herding,
metal, bows and arrows, substantial buildings, settled villages, writing,
chiefdoms, or states. Instead, Australian Aborigines were nomadic or
seminomadic hunter-gatherers, organized into bands, living in temporary
shelters or huts, and still dependent on stone tools. During the last 13,000
years less cultural change has accumulated in Australia than in any other
continent. The prevalent European view of Native Australians was already
typified by the words of an early French explorer, who wrote, "They are
the most miserable people of the world, and the human beings who
approach closest to brute beasts."
Yet, as of 40,000 years ago, Native Australian societies enjoyed a big
head start over societies of Europe and the other continents. Native Australians
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 oldest
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 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 (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