GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

332. • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
hair unbound, and tattooed their bodies. Some of them ate their food without
its being cooked by fire." The Zhou author went on to describe wild
tribes to the south, west, and north as indulging in equally barbaric practices,
such as turning their feet inward, tattooing their foreheads, wearing
skins, living in caves, not eating cereals, and, of course, eating their food
raw.
States organized by or modeled on that Zhou Dynasty of North China
spread to South China during the first millennium B.C., culminating in
China's political unification under the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.c. Its cultural
unification accelerated during that same period, as literate "civilized" Chinese
states absorbed, or were copied by, the illiterate "barbarians." Some
of that cultural unification was ferocious: for instance, the first Qin
emperor condemned all previously written historical books as worthless
and ordered them burned, much to the detriment of our understanding of
early Chinese history and writing. Those and other draconian measures
must have contributed to the spread of North China's Sino-Tibetan languages
over most of China, and to reducing the Miao-Yao and other language
families to their present fragmented distributions.
Within East Asia, China's head start in food production, technology,
writing, and state formation had the consequence that Chinese innovations
also contributed heavily to developments in neighboring regions. For
instance, until the fourth millennium B.c. most of tropical Southeast Asia
was still occupied by hunter-gatherers making pebble and flake stone tools
belonging to what is termed the Hoabinhian tradition, named after the
site of Hoa Binh, in Vietnam. Thereafter, Chinese-derived crops, Neolithic
technology, village living, and pottery similar to that of South China
spread into tropical Southeast Asia, probably accompanied by South China's
language families. The historical southward expansions of Burmese,
Laotians, and Thais from South China completed the Salification of tropical
Southeast Asia. All those modern peoples are recent offshoots of their
South Chinese cousins.
So overwhelming was this Chinese steamroller that the former peoples
of tropical Southeast Asia have left behind few traces in the region's modern
populations. Just three relict groups of hunter-gatherers—the Semang
Negritos of the Malay Peninsula, the Andaman Islanders, and the Veddoid
Negritos of Sri Lanka—remain to suggest that tropical Southeast Asia's
former inhabitants may have been dark-skinned and curly-haired, like
modern New Guineans and unlike the light-skinned, straight-haired South