GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

316 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
nated with war for the purposes of head-hunting and capturing women to
become wives.
Despite the dilution of New Guinea culture by distance and war, some
New Guinea influence did manage to reach Australia. Intermarriage carried
New Guinea physical features, such as coiled rather than straight hair,
down the Cape York Peninsula. Four Cape York languages had phonemes
unusual for Australia, possibly because of the influence of New Guinea
languages. The most important transmissions were of New Guinea shell
fishhooks, which spread far into Australia, and of New Guinea outrigger
canoes, which spread down the Cape York Peninsula. New Guinea drums,
ceremonial masks, funeral posts, and pipes were also adopted on Cape
York. But Cape York Aborigines did not adopt agriculture, in part because
what they saw of it on Muralug Island was so watered-down. They did
not adopt pigs, of which there were few or none on the islands, and which
they would in any case have been unable to feed without agriculture. Nor
did they adopt bows and arrows, remaining instead with their spears and
spear-throwers.
Australia is big, and so is New Guinea. But contact between those two
big landmasses was restricted to those few small groups of Torres Strait
islanders with a highly attenuated New Guinea culture, interacting with
those few small groups of Cape York Aborigines. The latter groups' decisions,
for whatever reason, to use spears rather than bows and arrows,
and not to adopt certain other features of the diluted New Guinea culture
they saw, blocked transmission of those New Guinea cultural traits to all
the rest of Australia. As a result, no New Guinea trait except shell fishhooks
spread far into Australia. If the hundreds of thousands of farmers
in the cool New Guinea highlands had been in close contact with the Aborigines
in the cool highlands of southeastern Australia, a massive transfer
of intensive food production and New Guinea culture to Australia might
have followed. But the New Guinea highlands are separated from the Australian
highlands by 2,000 miles of ecologically very different landscape.
The New Guinea highlands might as well have been the mountains of the
moon, as far as Australians' chances of observing and adopting New
Guinea highland practices were concerned.
In short, the persistence of Stone Age nomadic hunter-gatherers in Australia,
trading with Stone Age New Guinea farmers and Iron Age Indonesian
farmers, at first seems to suggest singular obstinacy on the part of
Native Australians. On closer examination, it merely proves to reflect the