GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

308 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
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.
WHILE THE NEW 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 accompanied
human colonization of Australia. That left Australia, like New
Guinea, with no domesticable native mammals. The sole foreign domesticated
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 cooperative
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 torrential
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