GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

298 GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
people, were farmers and swineherds. They lived in settled villages and
were organized politically into tribes rather than bands. All New Guineans
had bows and arrows, and many used pottery. New Guineans tended to
have much more substantial dwellings, more seaworthy boats, and more
numerous and more varied utensils than did Australians. As a consequence
of being food producers instead of hunter-gatherers, New Guineans lived
at much higher average population densities than Australians: New
Guinea has only one-tenth of Australia's area but supported a native population
several times that of Australia's.
Why did the human societies of the larger landmass derived from Pleistocene
Greater Australia remain so "backward" in their development,
while the societies of the smaller landmass "advanced" much more rapidly?
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 distance
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: supposed
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