GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

YALI'S PEOPLE • 311
was reaped with stone knives, piled into haystacks, and threshed to obtain
the seeds, which were then stored in skin bags or wooden dishes and finally
ground with millstones. Several of the tools used in this process, such as
the stone reaping knives and grindstones, were similar to the tools independently
invented in the Fertile Crescent for processing seeds of other
wild grasses. Of all the food-acquiring methods of Aboriginal Australians,
millet harvesting is perhaps the one most likely to have evolved eventually
into crop production.
Along with intensified food gathering in the last 5,000 years came new
types of tools. Small stone blades and points provided more length of
sharp edge per pound of tool than the large stone tools they replaced.
Hatchets with ground stone edges, once present only locally in Australia,
became widespread. Shell fishhooks appeared within the last thousand
years.
WHY DID AUSTRALIA not develop metal tools, writing, and politically
complex societies? A major reason is that Aborigines remained huntergatherers,
whereas, as we saw in Chapters 12-14, those developments
arose elsewhere only in populous and economically specialized societies
of food producers. In addition, Australia's aridity, infertility, and climatic
unpredictability limited its hunter-gatherer population to only a few hundred
thousand people. Compared with the tens of millions of people in
ancient China or Mesoamerica, that meant that Australia had far fewer
potential inventors, and far fewer societies to experiment with adopting
innovations. Nor were its several hundred thousand people organized into
closely interacting societies. 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.
Even within the relatively moist and productive eastern side of the continent,
exchanges between societies were limited by the 1,900 miles from
Queensland's tropical rain forests in the northeast to Victoria's temperate
rain forests in the southeast, a geographic and ecological distance as great
as that from Los Angeles to Alaska.
Some apparent regional or continentwide regressions of technology in
Australia may stem from the isolation and relatively few inhabitants of
its population centers. The boomerang, that quintessential Australian