GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

YALI'S PEOPLE • 301
since the various dates hardly differ within the experimental error of the
radiocarbon method.
At the Pleistocene times when Australia and New Guinea were initially
occupied, the Asian continent extended eastward to incorporate the modern
islands of Borneo, Java, and Bali, nearly 1,000 miles nearer to Australia
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 thousand
years ago, those crossings may have been achieved by bamboo rafts,
low-tech but seaworthy watercraft still in use in coastal South China
today. The crossings must nevertheless have been difficult, because after
that initial landfall by 40,000 years ago the archaeological record provides
no compelling evidence of further human arrivals in Greater Australia
from Asia for tens of thousands of years. Not until within the last few
thousand years do we encounter the next firm evidence, in the form of the
appearance of Asian-derived pigs in New Guinea and Asian-derived dogs
in Australia.
Thus, the human societies of Australia and New Guinea developed in
substantial isolation from the Asian societies that founded them. That isolation
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 highlanders
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 Indonesians
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 reason
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.