GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

312. • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
weapon, was abandoned in the Cape York Peninsula of northeastern Australia.
When encountered by Europeans, the Aborigines of southwestern
Australia did not eat shellfish. The function of the small stone points that
appear in Australian archaeological sites around 5,000 years ago remains
uncertain: while an easy explanation is that they may have been used as
spearpoints and barbs, they are suspiciously similar to the stone points
and barbs used on arrows elsewhere in the world. If they really were so
used, the mystery of bows and arrows being present in modern New
Guinea but absent in Australia might be compounded: perhaps bows and
arrows actually were adopted for a while, then abandoned, across the Australian
continent. All these examples remind us of the abandonment of
guns in Japan, of bows and arrows and pottery in most of Polynesia, and
of other technologies in other isolated societies (Chapter 13).
The most extreme losses of technology in the Australian region took
place on the island of Tasmania, 130 miles off the coast of southeastern
Australia. At Pleistocene times of low sea level, the shallow Bass Strait
now separating Tasmania from Australia was dry land, and the people
occupying Tasmania were part of the human population distributed continuously
over an expanded Australian continent. When the strait was at
last flooded around 10,000 years ago, Tasmanians and mainland Australians
became cut off from each other because neither group possessed
watercraft capable of negotiating Bass Strait. Thereafter, Tasmania's population
of 4,000 hunter-gatherers remained out of contact with all other
humans on Earth, living in an isolation otherwise known only from science
fiction novels.
When finally encountered by Europeans in A.D. 1642, the Tasmanians
had the simplest material culture of any people in the modern world. Like
mainland Aborigines, they were hunter-gatherers without metal tools. But
they also lacked many technologies and artifacts widespread on the mainland,
including barbed spears, bone tools of any type, boomerangs, ground
or polished stone tools, hafted stone tools, hooks, nets, pronged spears,
traps, and the practices of catching and eating fish, sewing, and starting a
fire. Some of these technologies may have arrived or been invented in
mainland Australia only after Tasmania became isolated, in which case we
can conclude that the tiny Tasmanian population did not independently
invent these technologies for itself. Others of these technologies were
brought to Tasmania when it was still part of the Australian mainland,
and were subsequently lost in Tasmania's cultural isolation. For example,